Archive for April, 2007
Pacific island lifted 3 meters out of the water by earthquake
Apr 12th
A serious (magnitude 8.1) under-sea earthquake lifted the tiny Solomon island of Ranongga 3 meters out of the water. The white now shown around the island is part of the surrounding coral reef which has been exposed by the lift.
I also found it amazing that there is a village on such a tiny island. There is more information and some more pics on National Geographic.
Absolutely massive natural crystals found in a Mexican cave
Apr 12th
This cave in Mexico contains some truely monumental crystals – all natural. Some of these buggers are 11 meters (36 feet) long! They took hundreds of years to form and are actually quite fragile. Note the man standing on the left to get an idea of the real size. More info on National Geographic.
You are not alone – on this site
Apr 11th
I got one of Google’s great tools, Google Analytics, to keep an eye on the people visiting this site. The package provides stacks of great statistics and trends which mean very little to me since so few people visit the site!…
Anyway, one cool piece of data that they provide is a world map overlay showing where the site visitors are from. This is a summary for the visits over the last 10 days. You are not alone….
And yes, I made sure that my own visits are not counted.
Astounding show put on in North Korea
Apr 11th
Check out these amazing pics from a performance they put on in North Korea. 100,000 people trained for a year to put on this show – and they have one every year! To celebrate Arirang Festival (The Mass Games) they get all these people into a big stadium with hundreds of dancers on the field putting on an awesome show. The really mad part though, is the backdrop on the other side of the stadium. It is made up an thousands of people holding up cards with different colours – like a picture with human pixels.
The level of detail and synchronisation in incredible and you really have to see this to get the idea. So check out these pics, and if you can I really recommend taking a look at this clip.
This kind of thing could only be achieved in a totalitarian society like North Korea’s and it really caught my imagination. My first instinct was to think that this was a massive waste of time and resources (North Korea has millions of starving people). But I realised that while these kids (many are school children) were training and working together to produce something incredible, kids in my own society were getting fat on the couch watching mind-numbing TV.
Still, the ability to make our own choices about what we do with our time is an important freedom. We should just make better choices
Crazy cabling in Hanoi
Apr 10th
Check out these pics from Hanoi, Vietnam. The guys over there have just gone crazy with cabling – no waiting for bureaucracy. Need a cable from A to B? No worries, we’ll just run it along next to all the others.
I like this kind of chaos, and it must be a pleasure to be able to “just get things done”. It’s a bit how I imagine London or New York back when things were crazy and people could just innovate and get things done. We live in such a controlled world these days…
Only problem is that this is not sustainable – imagine trying to fix a problem in one of the cables in that mess!
Cycling from Morocco to South Africa – Update
Apr 5th
Recently I wrote about Cecil who is riding through Africa from Morocco to South Africa. He has just posted an update to his adventure diary – and it makes interesting reading.
They are now 2800 km into the trip and have passed through Morocco, Mauritania and into Senegal. It sounds like he isn’t going to miss the heat, sand and unbearable flies of Mauritania, but as usual the stories and pictures are great. Great reading for desk-jockeys like me.
Some of the highlights:
- Staying with Mauritanian camel herders and drinking fresh camel milk
- Cycling through the desert at midnight under a full moon. (It’s too hot to cycle through the day so they have been cycling quite a lot at night)
- Cecil has developed a 6 step method for dealing with the regular sand-blastings they get from trucks screaming past at “a pace just under the speed of sound”. It includes several steps for swearing and some quick moving to minimize the impacts.
A great part of the story has Cecil resting under a tree when his family pull up in a car! He wasn’t hallucinating – they came out to surprise him.
48% of Americans are either ignorant, stupid, or insane
Apr 2nd
Newsweek just published a survey about Americans and faith. Among their results were the following:
- 48% of Americans do not believe that “evolution [is] well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community”.
- 34% of college graduates accept the Biblical story of creation as fact.
Richard Dawkins once said: “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)”.
A typically controversial statement from Dawkins. I think that most people who deny evolution are indeed ignorant, but there are other important motivations too.
Gravity is ‘just’ a theory
Apr 2nd
If you drop something – say an apple – it will fall right? But how do you know that it will fall? In fact, you don’t actually know that it will fall – but every other time you dropped something it fell, so you are pretty sure that this time the apple will fall too.
This is a (very) simplistic example of how humans have been gaining knowledge for thousands of years. Basically we follow a simple process:
- We observe things in the world around us. Every time I drop something, it falls to the ground.
- We propose a hypothesis explaining what we see. I propose that every time I drop something it will fall. (As an aside this is not the theory of gravity*)
- We make predictions according to the hypothesis. I predict that every time I drop something… down it will go.
- We use the predictions to create and repeat experiments. Drop a bunch of things to check that our prediction holds.
One day we could disprove the theory by dropping something that doesn’t fall. But, no matter how many experiments we conduct, we can never prove our theory. We just amass a lot of evidence that we are right, but the point is our idea remains a theory. It could be proven wrong at any time.
Evolution is also ‘just a theory’ – but so is gravity, and our theory about dropping things. And like gravity, evolution has a HUGE amount of evidence behind it. Don’t dump it because it’s just a theory – otherwise you should be dumping everything that humans have learned over the last 13,000 years!
* The theory of gravity, at a very simple level, states:
- Any two objects will attract each other. For example the earth exerts a force of attraction on you – and you exert a force of attraction on the earth.
- The force of that attractions is proportional to the mass (size) of the objects. The earth is really massive so the force between you is enough to hold you down!
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