I have been working on a new little project which I would like you all to take a look at. A couple of weeks ago I had the idea to set up a Wikipedia-like site for things to do in Cape Town. A site where anyone can easily add and edit information about activities in Cape Town.

I have set up a framework that I am pretty happy with - the geek in me has really been enjoying this. I also populated it with some sample activities.

It’s still very early days (Jules can’t stand the logo) and things are still changing and improving, but take a look and let me know what you think. If you feel up to it you can add/edit activities pretty easily and even anonymously.

Here is the link.

Yet another blog post about pools! This time there is a round up of “cool pools”.

The best by far is this “inverse pool” illusion created by having a shallow pool with a glass bottom above a room. To people above the pool it looks like others are walking around underwater. To those inside it looks like they are in the pool too. Pretty cool effect.

I just love this clip (although I’m not convinced that is a lemur)

I recently found three blog postings with some pretty cool photos:

• 20 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Angle
• 20 More Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Angle
• 25 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Time

There are a few rubbish pics, but most of them are worth a look (note that you may have seen some of these in forwarded mails). Here are some of my favorites to whet your appetite.

I really like this photo from National Geographic showing a Bengal tiger jumping off a boat in India. The tiger had escaped the reserve she was from and landed up in a village bordering the park.

That didn’t go so well for her because the villagers got together and started throwing burning sticks and stones at her. In an effort to escape she hastily climbed a date palm where she was eventually tranquilized and captured by rangers (here is a video of the action - I haven’t watched it).

They saw to her wounds and then released her back into the reserve - which is what you are seeing above. Apparently there are only 1,400 Bengal tigers left in the wild so it’s cool that they saved this one - and she was pregnant!

HowStuffWorks has this article detailing colorblindness. Quite interesting reading - but there is quite a lot of detail. Included in the article is this demo simulating how the world looks to those who suffer from colorblindness.

Click on the buttons to see what the image looks like to people with different types of colorblindness. This means that they would not notice a difference in the image when the button is pressed.

When I read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth my imagination was caught by a part of the story where the heroes are lost without water for days and almost die of thirst. The superb Adrift and Survive the Savage Sea both tell stories about people struggling for survival while lost at sea. It seems that people can survive quite long without food, but lack of water kills pretty quickly.

How Stuff Works has a pretty detailed article on the subject at the moment. What are the answers?

• How long you can go without food depends a lot on the circumstances. Some people last longer than others. Temperature makes a big difference. Pretty much the same thing for water - circumstances make a huge difference.
• “Most doctors agree that healthy humans can go up to eight weeks without food as long as they have water”
• In ideal conditions “a human can probably live for about 3 to 5 days without any water“

At the end of the article they have included a little story about a hunger strike by some IRA prisoners in 1981. Nine of these guys starved themselves to death with one guy lasting 73 days without any food!

National Geographic has a gallery of the best news photos of 2007. Most are pretty cool - here are some of them.

This is an exhausted US soldier collapsing in his bunker in Afghanistan.

Park rangers carrying a mountain gorilla that had been shot in Congo. The rangers think that illegal charcoal traders killed this gorilla and several others.

This one shows the “shock and disorientation of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.”

The Economist had this special Valentine’s graph (a bit late I know) showing the relationship between chocolate consumption and frequency of sex.

I like their introduction: “On Valentine’s Day the relationship between chocolate and sex becomes, at least for gentlemen considering the ideal gift, less a matter of theoretical musing and one of stark practicality.”

However, it seems that there isn’t much of a relationship. Just be glad you don’t live in Japan where chocolate consumption and frequency of sex are pretty low…

Boing Boing has this post showing some cool illusions that rely on brightness differences. There are a few of them, but this is the a good one. The two squares A and B are actually exactly the same color. Seriously.

I have copy-pasted the areas next each other as proof below.

I love optical illusions because they show just how fallible our brains really are. It feels like we are getting a reliable picture of the world when in fact our consciousness is actually getting something far more complex from the subconscious.

We don’t see an image like a camera - at any one time we are only really seeing a surprisingly small area and our subconscious is doing gymnastics to give what we think we see.

Generally this works very well, but these “tricks” can sometimes mistakes - enter the optical illusion. You can be sure that this kind of thing happens in lots of areas other than vision - for example our sense of morality.