Author Archives: alistair

Devils peak fire – a little too close

Fire burning above Vredehoek on Devils Peak

Last night was pretty exciting/intense. We woke up at 01h30 to hear sirens outside. I got up and went out onto the balcony to see what was going on.

Chaos!

There was a huge fire raging on Devils Peak behind the house. The police were driving up and down the streets using a loud-speaker to tell people to evacuate and move away from the fire area.

Cars and people were streaming down from the higher blocks. There was stacks of smoke blowing down the hill and even burning embers landing in the street.

We cruised around for a while but the smoke was too hectic to stick outside for long. At one stage it looked as if the Western most of the Disa Park towers might burn down.

Thank heavens the fire fighters managed to beat the flames off and by this morning the choppers were making sure that everything was out.

An exciting evening indeed.

DA launches a Obama style online campaign

DA LogoThe DA is trying to emulate some of the success that Barack Obama had online during his election campaign.

He set up highly effective online resources and managed to mobilize a LOT of support online. South Africa obviously isn’t as conducive to using the internet, but it’s still a great idea.

The DA have just launched a social network (like a mini Facebook – complete with profile page and wall!) called Contribue to Change. You can easily register on the site and:

  • Connect with other DA supports in your area and around the country
  • Find out about events in your region
  • Get lots of information on how to help the DA in this crucial election
  • Join groups for particular causes, activities and events

I recommend that you at least take a look. Even joining is very easy and you aren’t actually expected to do anything more.

The site itself works fairly well. It’s driven by WordPress (the same software that runs this blog) with a social networking plugin called Buddypress. Most features work perfectly with a few clunky areas here and there (like the avatars which just don’t work for me).

Give it a look. Here’s a link to my profile page.

Screenshot of Contribute to Change

This is a super important election for South Africa.

We really, really all need to get out and vote against the ANC (DA is an excellent choice, but against the ANC is important).

I won’t get into too much detail now, but here are 3 big reasons to get involved:

  • If the ANC get a two thirds majority then JZ can do anything he wants. Including passing a law that he can’t be prosecuted. I’m not kidding – that is what the ANC say they will do
  • We need a strong opposition in SA. Now that the ANC has split we have a very good opportunity to build a strong opposition to the completely inept and at least partially corrupt ANC government
  • There is an excellent chance that the DA can win the Western Cape from the ANC and make a great difference to a great province.

Change we can believe in

Darwin Change posterI just love these Obama parody posters of Darwin. The original Obama posters were good, but these are just great.

View some more on the original page.

Also, from that page I was found a link to this great video. It compresses 4.6 billions years of life into 60 seconds. It’s a great way to show just what an explosion has happened in the last few hundred million years.

I have more than 5 senses

I do have more than 5 senses. So do you. And no, I’m not talking about any hippie stuff.

Senses are the physiological methods of perceiving our environment. When we were kids we got taught that humans have 5 senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste).

Is that really all there is to it? Only five ways of perceiving the world around us?

Actually no! If you really think about it we have other senses too:

  • Sense of balance. Known as equilibrioception this is how we keep our balance. Sensory organs in our ears take care of our senses of balance. Incidentally they also get quite confused when you spin around making yourself dizzy.
  • Sense of temperature. Known as thermoreception this is how we can sense heat and the lack of heat (cold)
  • Sense of body positions. This one is a little trickier to explain. Close your eyes and touch your nose with you finger. Even though your eyes were closed you could use propriorecption to sense where your hand was at all times.
  • Sense of pain. Nociception makes use of three different kinds of dedicated pain receptors to let us know when we are damaging our bodies.
  • Sense of time. Apparently our brains do have some sense of time – we’re able to understand roughly how much time has passed without other stimuli.

There are also other ‘senses’ that affect humans. For instance how do you think you know when you’re hungry?

So it seems that they lied to us when we were young. Yet another lie-to-children, although in this case I don’t think it was necessary.

Bat Run 2009

There are many great trail running events in Cape Town – we must be one of the best cities in the world for trail running.

One of my favorites is the Bat Run – a mad race that I took part in this Saturday evening.

The Bat Run is run in the mountains at night (hence the name) and includes running:

  1. Up and down Devils Peak
  2. Up Table Mountain, across the top and then back down again
  3. Up and down Lions Head

That’s over 2000m of climbing and descending and a total distance of more than 25km – in the mountains and at night. Mad.

It’s a tough event but it favors the good climbers – like me. Last year I surprised myself by coming in 6th position and finishing in under 5 hours.

This year I went even better and managed to come in second at 4:03 which is under the old record. I just managed to hold off the guy who came in second – he was only about a minute behind me near the top of Lions Head so I had to push my body a little too hard.

Leo Rust set a new record at 3:46 which I won’t ever come close to.

This picture (by Eric Tollner) shows me reaching the top of Platteklip Gorge on Table Mountain. Real deer-in-the-headlights expression – I was pretty tired and quite surprised.

bat-run-09-deer-headlights

Economist Summaries – Feb 7 part 1

I love The Economist. I find their articles well written, logical, current, and often fascinating. The problem is that each week there are just too many articles to read them all.

I’ve always wished that there was a site available providing concise summaries of the articles for easier reading. There isn’t one that I can find so I figured I would give it a try. I banged out some notes as I read through this week’s edition.

Here is the first part of my roundup (there are plenty more articles just from this edition)…

Zimbabwe – Wait and see

  • Morgan Tsvangarai has bowed to pressure from Southern African countries and joined a government of national unity
  • The Economist reckons that this is probably not going to do much good – nothing has changed
  • In fact this move may help Mugabe by providing his evil regime with a ‘fig leaf’ of legitimacy
  • The Economist argues that targeted sanctions should continue until there is real change

The world economy – The return of economic nationalism

  • This article argues against the temptation towards economic nationalism
    • In short economic nationalism is anti-trade action taken by a country with the goal of benefiting the local economy (e.g. only buying US products, increasing tariffs, etc)
  • The US stimulus package has a controversial clause that would “press for the use of American materials in public works”
  • The argument is that trade is necessary for recovering from the recession – economic nationalism would damage trade and therefore make it more difficult for everyone to recover
  • The Economist says that Barack Obama should be applying three principles
    • Coordination: The various stimulus plans should be well coordinated for greater effect
    • Forbearance: Don’t go for the quick fix now that will hurt even more later
    • Multilateralism: Work together with the rest of the world to recover

Infrastructure and the stimulus bill – Be careful what you wish for

  • This article discusses the various options available as targets in the public works stimulus bill
  • There is a balance between getting going quickly and taking on really worth while projects
  • In many cases repairs to existing infrastructure would be more useful, and more effective uses of the money

Open government – Track my tax dollars

  • In 2006 Barack Obama and another junior senator called for an online database where people could easily track how government was spending their taxes
  • The bill was initially blocked by dodgy senators but they were revealed and shamed by bloggers!
  • There are now several effective online portals that allow the public to see how dollars are spent

Australia’s economic stimulus – Hey big spender

  • Article describing the Australian stimulus package to try to avoid recession
  • Their package is worth USD27 billion – the biggest in Australia’s history

Ethiopia – A row over human rights

  • This article describes how the Ethiopian government is suppressing human rights
  • Specifically freedom of speech has been completely suppressed

Graph comparing job losses in US recessions

I came across this graph that compares US job losses in the current recession to losses in previous recessions.

  • The graph shows losses as a percentage of the peak
  • The current recession has already seen more jobs lost than the 2001 recession
  • Employment statistics are notoriously sneaky. For instance over the years the definitions have changed so comparisons are tough
  • It looks like the current recession is going to be a biggy

Job loss comparison graph

Nostradamus was a quack

NostradamusIt seems obvious that Nostradamus was a quack. But thanks to sensationalist modern documentaries a lot of people get convinced that he was onto something. Fortunately Cecil Adams from The Straight Dope comes to the rescue yet again.

Aside:

The Straight Dope (motto = fighting ignorance since 1973) is a great blog. Readers email in interesting (and funny/strange) questions and this guy, Cecil Adams (self-proclaimed most intelligent human being) researches the hell out of them.

His answers are almost always both informative and humorous. I recommend the site. Incidentally more then 30 US newspapers agree with me and publish his column weekly.

Anyway, his latest posting is about Nostradamus and he points out that Nostradamus was inaccurate and only seems good because:

  1. He made so many predictions that were so vague that it is possible to fit many of them onto things that have since happened. No concrete predictions.
  2. During the translation from the original French a lot of the predictions have been seriously twisted to sound more plausible.

Take a look at the article for some good examples to see what I mean.

But then, it was pretty obvious that this was bull right? Seriously. It sounded cool, but were you seriously going to believe that someone could foretell the future? Seriously?

More shocking evolution stats

Numbers like those represented in this graph from The Economist upset me badly. The fact that only about 40% of Americans believe evolution is true is just horrific!

Anyone who knows anything about evolution (it is so fundamental that it should be taught in primary school) should see evolution for what it is – obviously true.

Evolution is so mind-blowingly obvious that I’m often surprised when intelligent friends refute it. I’ve gone to great lengths to understand how intelligent people who are not ignorant of the details can still argue against evolution.

Religion.

These guys and girls are so desperate to hold onto something that they reject something as fundamental and as obvious as evolution…

Graph showing belief in evolution by country