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talfryn.net (16 unread)

• April 26, 2009
• 17:18

  Conversation as an exercise of minds

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  I embark upon discussion and argument with great ease and liberty. Since opinions do not find me in a ready soil to thrust and spread their roots into, no premise shocks me, no belief turns me, no matter how opposite to my own they may be. There is no idea so frivolous or odd which does not appear to me to be fittingly produced by the mind of man.

  ~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

• April 23, 2009
• 17:36

  Singapore Blue Plan 2009

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  The latest (Draft) Blue Plan has been released! From the IYOR08 blog:

  The Draft Blue Plan is a proposal to the Government and people of Singapore from the members and organizations that form “International Year of the Reef (IYOR) 2008 Singapore” – interested members of civil society concerned about the conservation and management of Singapore’s coral reef heritage. Contributions and advice from the leading marine biologists in Singapore have been incorporated. It was released on 23 April 2009. Members of the Public can download a copy of the Draft Blue Plan here.

  Comments and suggestions from members of public are invited. You may email us at blueplan.singapore@gmail.combefore the closing date, 14 May 2009. The Blue Plan will presented to the Government with the collated and edited comments in late May 2009.

• April 22, 2009
• 16:06

  Earth Day visitor

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  
  Pea blue (Lampides boeticus) on my parents’ bed.

• April 20, 2009
• 16:36

  Unbearable Lightness of Being III

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  Tereza kept stroking Karenin’s head, which was quietly resting in her lap, while something like the following ran through her mind: There’s no particular merit in being nice to one’s fellow man. She had to treat the other villagers decently, because otherwise she couldn’t live there. Even with Tomas, she was obliged to behave lovingly because she needed him. We can never establish with certainly what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

  True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental débâcle, a débâcle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

  ~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

• April 18, 2009
• 13:51

  Buloh blues

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  The moment I began the tour this morning, I knew that I was under-performing. It was one of my worst sessions in all these years. The hoo-ahness wasn’t there, and it never came. I didn’t even bother trying hard. It’s just not been a good day… distractions, thoughts, dread in my mind, and I was tired from the week. Never underestimate the importance of the state of mind of a nature guide in effective nature interpretation. I felt sorry for my visitors.

• April 17, 2009
• 15:45

  Seahuskying

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  Even while on solid ground, I still feel as if I’m riding on gentle waves. Clocked up about 12 hours out at sea during the past three days - either at the helm (working towards a powerboat driving licence), getting my bum numbed on the crewseats, or trying to track and shoot terns with the ‘nuclear missile’ (it was an overkill).

  Unfortunately, it was blue skies and scorching sun during the days of the practical lessons (I’ve tanned significantly), and grey sullen weather during the tern-shoot. I’ll definitely be back; yesterday was but a trial run!

  
  Black-naped terns

• April 16, 2009
• 15:12

  Light is everything

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  A lone, wild bioluminescent mushroom as the naked eye sees it. Taken with a 30-second exposure, not too long ago.

• April 15, 2009
• 14:01

  On vanity II: Progress

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  I fear that I will personally lose by the change. My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too. I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first. We are often as stupid when correcting ourselves as others… … I have long since grown old but not one inch wiser. ‘I’ now and ‘I’ then are certainly twain, but which ‘I’ was better? I know nothing about that. If we were always progressing towards improvement, to be old would be a beautiful thing.

  ~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

• April 14, 2009
• 17:21

  The mozzie that landed on Semakau

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  On a grid chart of Singapore waters that was laid out on our desks during the course. What were the odds?!

• April 13, 2009
• 17:21

  On vanity I: Appearances

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  We cheat ourselves of what is rightly useful to us in order to conform our appearances to the common opinion. We are not so much concerned with what the actual nature of our being is within us, as with how it is perceived by the public. Even wisdom and the good things of the mind seem fruitless to us if we enjoy them by ourselves, if they are not paraded before the approving eyes of others.

  ~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

• April 12, 2009
• 13:23

  Good Friday weekend

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  At Buloh, my sis pointed out an Atlas Moth perched right behind me (I was much too engrossed in photographing a tiny juvenile Argiope spider) and according to her, I sprang a little sideways when I came to realise the close proximity of the giant of moths to my head. How I missed it I have no idea, and in her words, it was “noob”ish of me. Other hightlights: Weaver ants tending to young hoppers, hovering d’flies, and a beautiful Gasteracantha.

  * * * * *

  We spent almost an entire day around the Butterfly Hill/Jelutong campsite on Pulau Ubin, a shrubbery patch which I doubt was larger than a 100m square but so rich was its arthropod diversity that we took hours just to advance a few metres. The variety of bird songs challenged my meagre birding skills, what with my then-knowledge of the call of the [Singapore] flowerpecker having been replaced with the screeches of the [Australian] galahs, which were in turn truncated to make space in my memory for the chirps of the [British] tits. And so on and so forth. I am in bad need of a refresher. More unforgivable was mistaking the chorus of cicadas for crickets, but it was a tune with which I was not familiar - coming from a striking red-and-black cicada species which I have not encountered before on the mainland and was later identified from photographs I took (not specimens I collected *hrrmph!*) as Huechys sanguinea. There’s also a bizarre-looking spider with a teardrop-shaped abdomen, and that one’s awaiting identification from the experts. A centipede was spotted residing quite cosily in what looked like the rolled-up leaf chamber of a sac spider. So many things to see, to shoot, to be baffled by…!

  
  
  More photos:
  Sungei Buloh, 10 Apr
  Pulau Ubin, 11 Apr

• April 10, 2009
• 17:17

  Laughter

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  Then it came, real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide. Bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad… And we laugh our laughter into the infinity of laughter… O laughter!… to laugh is to live profoundly.

  ~ Milan Kundera, The book of laughter and forgetting

• April 08, 2009
• 17:33

  Acridotheres javanicus

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  We thought somebody died and was rotting in my boss’ room; the stink was unbearable. Pest control came by in the afternoon and extracted from the ceiling boards two dead mynah nestlings, which were all chirpy and very much alive the week before.

  Sigh, the fragility of life… …

  Saddening also, that we find these common birds blog-worthy only when they’re tragically dead.

• April 07, 2009
• 5:08

  The Chrysopids I

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  Not being able to find aphids for the lacewing larvae, I settled for whatever I could find on the leaves of the plants surrounding the office. Fortunately, the larvae took quite well to the whiteflies (Aleyrodidae) and other smiliar-sized insects.

  I placed the larvae and their prey onto an island surrounded by a moat in a dish, and observed the proceedings under the microscope. It was like watching Discovery Channel live - almost!

  A larva loads itself with debris (a mixture of pieces of vegetation and the remnants of its previous meals, serving as both camouflage and defense against subjugation); it arches backwards and applies the packet to the spikes on its back:

  Here one of the larvae has impaled the fly on its jaws and is sucking it out, and another is trying to steal debris off the first:

  In this short video clip (please excuse Bach in the background), a larva appears to have successfully harrassed another and taken over its place at the table:

• April 06, 2009
• 10:42

  Unbearable Lightness of Being II

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.

  They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual’s life.

  Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

  It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

  ~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

• 10:34

  Egg-sitting

   » ‎ talfryn.net
  
  

  On my desk sit containers housing stalks of lacewing eggs, a clump of hemipteran eggs, a pair of gecko eggs, and an egg of mysterious origins, unknown disposition and undetermined fertility which was found exposed on a grass patch just behind the office block.

  Some of the lacewings have hatched; the ravenous larvae have cannibalised one another and only four out of the dozen were left standing by the time I had gotten round to separating them into individual cells. Now I’ve to find food for them - donations of aphids and mealy bugs are welcomed.

  
  Lacewing eggs (Neuroptera - Chrysopidae)

  
  Mystery egg