I am so amused when I see two posts on the ping.sg top 10 saying that William Hung has died. But apparently, that is ‘old news’. The word for it is a hoax according to this. And it is a hoax (or ‘broken news’) that is almost 3 years old. Just where did these people dig up this old fossil? Frankly, would you not have seen it on CNN or even our evening Chinese tabloids by now if such a thing is even true?

I have posted the link from Snopes to both blogs and obviously one of the bloggers who posted this misinformation considered my comment – William Hung is about as dead as George W. Bush – too offensive to pass his moderation standards or he is doing some verification on his own.

Is it a wonder why most people does not consider blogs a worthy source of news and information on the Internet? The reason is obvious when people simply just try to get more attention and visitors to their blogs by posting things that would scream * click me * (which looked like ‘dick me’), but none of them has spent even the minimum effort to do some verification to confirm the truthfulness of the information they are posting! However, I would applaud those who have the common courtesy and responsibility to allow the counter-information to be published so their readers can make an informed decision on what they are reading.

For goodness sake (and I will say this again and again like a broken record), there are enough written material on the Internet to verify if such things are true when you care to look (or when you looked hard enough). Please, verify what you post and don’t spread misinformation!!

And if you are posting something in jest, leave a disclaimer or something so your readers are aware before they get infected by a variant of the ‘forward this to all your friends’ email virus which compels them to send it to everyone on their contact list. After all, a lot of other people also never bother to verify what they pass on to the next reader, who is none the wiser about the truthfulness and authenticity of the information given to them.

I don’t know about the rest of you. But I do not want to misinform my friends or those who trust me, much less complete strangers on the net who chanced upon my blog!

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Today is Blog Action Day and the theme this year is the Environment.

The environmental problems the human race faces today is more than just Global Warming, which Al Gore has done too well to publicise. The other environmental problems the we seldom talk about is resources management – the management of land (including our arable land and forest), water, minerals (which would include natural gas, crude oil, coal, and metals).

This book would give you a general idea the disaster we could end up with, if we failed to properly manage the resources on our planet.

There are several case studies in the book, some showing societies which failed, and some showing those which succeeded. The main purpose of all these case studies however, is to remind us to use resources in such a way which is sustainable. For e.g., upgrading your mobile phone every few months, upgrading your computer as quickly as the next processor is available so you can play your latest games, and scrapping your new car to ‘make money’ before it’s life is up, are examples of not using the planet’s resources in a sustainable way. (In other words, the COE is an evil and environmentally unfriendly scheme.)

We might be able to export our environment problems to third world countries – for e.g. buying their resources on the cheap or dumping our industrial waste there, but it is only delaying the inevitable. By doing so, the people of the third world countries may suffer and perish before we do, but we are merely obtaining for ourself the privilege of being the last to perish.

So, you can start doing something for the environment from today by: