Last night South Africa crashed out of yet another Cricket World Cup. In the past I devastated by these world cup exits, but I wasn’t nearly as upset as usual this time around. I think that this was partially due to the fact that it wasn’t a close match, and that we had played badly throughout.

However, I also like to think that my reactions to these tragedies show that I have been maturing.

When I was 16 in 1999 when we got bumped out of the competition by an ascendant Australia in that match. I still hurt thinking about what could have been if we had won that match.
Reaction – I collapsed onto my couch and cried – and I was upset for months (if not years)

Then in 2003 we screwed up the rain charts and crashed out in needless fashion – another close one and this time at home. This time I was 20, at university and living in digs.
Reaction - I went out and drowned out my sorrows in a big way.

Now in 2007 we were hammered by a truly awesome Australian outfit. Out team had played badly all tournament and we were well and truly pummelled.
Reaction – I said “Oh, well” carried on with my work, went for a run and then had a lovely dinner with Julie.

The maturing Alistair illustrated through the metranomic tragedies of South Africa at the Cricket World Cup.

This is a the greatest ever photo of a praying mantis (from Flickr). They really can be aggressive little buggers.

In fact, check out this photo and story about a mantis which captured and ate a hummingbird! He impaled the hummingbird with one spiny appendage and ate his fill with the other, before dropping the dead bird and moving on. Incredible.

Both links via Boing Boing

One of the Economist journalists is keeping a journal after sneaking back into Zim to check things out. He had previously been thrown out for being “a spy masquerading as a tourist” and was pretty frightened on his way in, especially after learning that “the man from Time spent an uncomfortable five days in the jug, without food”.

His first entry is about trying to sneak in without being noticed. He talks about having used “tennis rackets, bird-watching guides and enormous paintings” in the past to get in as a tourist. He was mightily relieved to find that although the government had boasted of a computerised list of banned journalists, they didn’t have any computers at the airport!

Hi second entry talks about how both Mugabe and the country he rules are strange combinations of wonderful and terrible. He describes how Mugabe is such a strange character:

• “There’s something about the president, those Elton John glasses, the camp flicking of his wrists, the moustache that recalls both Chaplin and Hitler, that makes him as much a caricature as a real man”
• “He is smart, agile, hard-working, yoga-exercising, frugal and he cracks a crude joke or two (Australians are “genetically modified criminals”; Tony Blair is a “boy in shorts” who leads a “government of gay gangsters”)”
• “But he is a charmer with fingers dipped in blood.” Lately he has brutalised opposition supporters and “worst of all, in the early 1980s as he established his control, Mr Mugabe directed the murder of many thousand opponents in the country’s south.”

This weekend Jules and I went camping at a place called Tweede Tol in the Bainskloof pass. It’s about 1.5 hours drive out of Cape Town and a great little place for a quick weekend away.

We only managed to leave Cape Town at about 4PM on Saturday so it was always going to be a little tight making it by 6PM when the camp site closes. Then we got a little lost on the way there (roads weren’t named what the map said they would be) so it was getting a little tense. The day was saved when we got directions from a massive Afrikaans guy with a curly mullet and a red city golf full of family. He gave us great directions and actually drove with us most of the way. He also pointed out the many speed traps along the way which was a great help.

So we got there just in time, and to my surprise the guy at the gate was quite happy with the printed confirmation I got after paying online. We were extremely lucky to get an awesome camp site near the end of the park and next to a river. We rushed to get the tent up before it got dark. Luckily, ours is an extremely simple tent and we were able to get it up in about 15 minutes – not bad for the first time.

We made a fire and then had lots of fun chatting, laughing, drinking wine, looking at the amazing stars, and playing with the camera. We got some pretty eerie pictures using the torch and putting the camera onto night mode. Check these out.

We had quite a comfortable night thanks to some great sleeping bags from my dad. They have built in inflatable mattresses which worked out great. A relatively comfortable sleep, and it was great being away from the city sounds. Jules got a little cold, I was a little warm – nothing unusual there.

In the morning I got the fire going again and then it was time for tea, breakfast snacks and packing up.

I bought a map of the hiking trails for R1 and we chose the longest route available to day hikers. A 9km hike from the camp site, up around a small mountain, and then back down to camp past a waterfall. I must say that I have never hiked along such rocky and uneven terrain. It was nothing like the Drakensberg hiking of my youth. In fact it was so rugged that we often had real problems figuring out where the path was and landed up walking quite a bit more than the 9km on the map.

Highlights of the hike itself were:

• A delicious lunch of left-overs from the braai.
  
• Awesome views.
• This shy little snake (which I almost stepped on!)
  
• Wading around in the river. It was too cold to actually swim in.

After the hike we enjoyed the beautiful drive back to Cape Town. A great weekend out of the city.

I’ll upload more photo’s to a Google album later and post the link here.

The world’s oldest continuously operating business recently ended its impressive run of 1,428 years. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.

After such a long and successful history, what went wrong?  Easy, they borrowed too much during the 1980’s when things were great in the Japanese economy.  Then around ‘92 and ‘93 the Japanese economy shrank along with the value of their assets.  They couldn’t keep up with debt and went under last year.  What a pity.

Image above is the first temple they ever built (completed in 593).  Below is a snap of some workers in the early 1900’s.

(via Boing Boing)

Cody Webb, a kid in the states was recently jailed for 12 days because of a bomb threat called in to his school. They nailed him because they had caller ID on the number he called – so they knew that he had called around the time of the threat. So the principal called the guy into the office and asked him his number. When he replied ’she started waving her hands in the air and saying “we got him, we got him.”’

‘They just started flipping out, saying I made a bomb threat to the school.’ After he protested his innocence, Webb says that the principal said: ‘Well, why should we believe you? You’re a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.’

So, despite the fact that the voice recorded sounded nothing like him, Webb was imprisoned in a juvenile detention facility. 12 days later someone realised that daylight saving had kicked in on the night of the incident and their timing was out by an hour. Webb had called the number a hour before the incident and was actually innocent!

What a hopeless feeling for him. Nobody believed him – not even his own parents. That sucks…

I recently read an article written by a paramedic about how stupid it is to drive without your seat belt fastened. Really, really stupid…

The potential (and avoidable) injuries are pretty frightening – and well described. If you don’t always fasten your seat belt then I recommend reading the whole thing. But here is a great paragraph from the article:

“In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That’s the second collision. That body’s internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments-and that’s where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when the bowling ball you left on the rear deck hits you in the back of the head, because that continued at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.”

They call it the elusive alarm clock. Hitting snooze once is allowed, but after that the alarm clock literally jumps off the bed-side table and runs away. It looks for a good place to hide and heads off, forcing you to get out of bed and catch the thing to turn off the alarm. This reminds me of a university friend who used to hide a second alarm clock in his cupboard so that he wouldn’t sleep through an exam.

One of the comments on an article about this is: “This might be more practical than strapping my alarm clock to my cat!”

In a similar vein, the alarm clock below is a simulated bomb which must be properly defused to prevent a super loud alarm from sounding. Gets those brains started nice and early.

What do you think about the new look on this site? Let me know by casting your vote below.

What modern animals are dinosaurs most related to? Since the 90’s I have been convinced that modern birds are related to (and therefore at least partially the descendants of) dinosaurs. I got the idea from Michael Crichton’s books Jurassic Park and The Lost World – both good reads even today. I found his arguments pretty compelling, but there wasn’t much evidence back then.

Now a world renowned paleantologist and his collegues have done an analysis on collagen proteins extracted from a T-Rex leg bone. They can’t get actual DNA (à la Jurassic Park) as it is too fragile to survive the millions of years. However, proteins are created from the plans encoded in DNA, so they are also very useful for species analysis. The team had already used this analysis to show that mastadons (very similar to woolly mammoths) are related to modern mammals (obvious!).

The new analysis found that the T-Rex had most proteins in common with the modern chicken! There were also less significant matches with frogs and newts. The guys didn’t have much of the T-Rex protein to analyse so this is only a partial test – but they are back out there looking for more!