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Yala National Park

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Heading further around the south coast we reached the first of the National Parks (Yala), famous for the variety of wildlife, in particular leopards.

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These thrive as there is a plenitude of prey including: rabbits; spotted deer; and young bore (piglets) not to mention those delicious peacocks, that have adorned many a royal table. Yet they do tend to flutter off.

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Buffalo; crocodiles (that seem to coexist); and elephants are probably an even tougher proposition for a quick snack.

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The Magampura Eco Village Resort is comfortable but like much of Sri Lanka, after the lean covid years, could use a bit of maintenance here and there.

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Throughout the country electricity distribution is well engineered, predominantly overhead lines on concrete poles, presumably because of the termites.

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High voltage transmission is at 220 KV and 132 KV. The local distribution grid is typically 11KV, dropping to 230/400 at 50 cycles for domestic use.

But we did experience several brief blackouts. I looked it up.

The IEA tells me: "Sri Lanka’s primary energy supply mainly comes from oil and coal. Almost 40% of Sri Lanka’s electricity came from hydropower in 2017 but coal’s shares in power generation has been increasing since 2010. Sri Lanka is reaching universal access to electricity but clean cooking remain an issue with 15 million people still relying on biomass to cook."

 

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Travel

South Korea & China

March 2016

 

 

South Korea

 

 

I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website.  Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited.  This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen.  It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.

A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ. 

Read more: South Korea & China

Fiction, Recollections & News

A Womens' view

 

Introduction

 

The following article presents a report by Jordan Baker, as part of her history assignment when she was in year 10 at North Sydney Girls’ High School.   For this assignment she interviewed her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother about their lives as girls; and the changes they had experienced; particularly in respect of the freedoms they were allowed.

Read more: A Womens' view

Opinions and Philosophy

Science, Magic and Religion

 

(UCLA History 2D Lectures 1 & 2)

 

Professor Courtenay Raia lectures on science and religion as historical phenomena that have evolved over time; starting in pre-history. She goes on to examine the pre-1700 mind-set when science encompassed elements of magic; how Western cosmologies became 'disenchanted'; and how magical traditions have been transformed into modern mysticisms.

The lectures raise a lot of interesting issues.  For example in Lecture 1, dealing with pre-history, it is convincingly argued that 'The Secret', promoted by Oprah, is not a secret at all, but is the natural primitive human belief position: that it is fundamentally an appeal to magic; the primitive 'default' position. 

But magic is suppressed by both religion and science.  So in our modern secular culture traditional magic has itself been transmogrified, magically transformed, into mysticism.

Read more: Science, Magic and Religion

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