Bahasa Melayu + English = RM800mil ?!

Saw it on the news preview government just now. Apparently Malaysian government want to revert back to Bahasa Melayu in the teaching of Math and Science in English. I think it's a good move, as many of student especially in the sub-urban and kampung area fail to cope with English implementation in both Science and Math despite years of training and hard works. Most of them are crawling just to grasp bit by bit what teachers teach in class. Thus, most teacher (i'm talking about the kampung area, from what I've seen) teaches in Bahasa Melayu. So the "Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dan Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris (PPSMI) will officially be converted back to Memertabatkan Bahasa Malaysia dan Memperkukuhkan Bahasa Inggeris (MBMMBI). Sound like fun eh? :)

But hey, it's RM800 million we talking about here. And that only cover the early stage of the overall transition. He said, that the money will be use to build/change software, hardware and to train the teachers. Its is such a large amount. Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin (Malaysian Minister of Education) also state that this long term campaign will cost around RM5 billion.

note: Wow! Thats a whole lot of money flowing. RM500mil and then another RM5bil. Let's hope its really gonna be put to good used shall we? Just sound too much to me, but hey, what do I know about politics + education right? Let's just wait and see haha...
p/s: might put up a dual-Bahasa blog after this :)

check out the news here

Awesome Earth from 6 billion kilometers away

small small small Earth~

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space.

The image is the inspiration behind Carl Sagan’s famous speech “Reflections on a Mote of Dust” -- a speech which should be read by every human being on planet Earth. 

"Reflections on a Mote of Dust" by Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Sagan points out that "all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home" (speech at Cornell University, October 13th 1994, shown here inside a blue circle).

Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996. 
Dr. Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot expands on these ideas. 
Image taken from Voyager 1, 1990.


credits: Reflections on a Mote of Dust and Kepler Mission's Photos - 50 Years in Space and also Wikipedia