Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hout Bay’s Sentinel mountain sold for R10m

Hout Bay's Sentinel has been sold Amazingly it seems that someone has managed to pick up a stunning mountain(!!) in Hout Bay for R10 million on auction. (see article on IOL).

The mountain was bought in a private auction for “about R10 million” after only 14 bids were received.

Why so cheap? Well it seems that there is a lot more to the story:

The residents in the area are militantly against any development. They broke up the original auction and were only dispersed when police began using rubber bullets on them.
SANParks is also after the site. Apparently (see article) the Parks Board have managed to grab all of the land around the sold plot – it is effectively cut off. I doubt that they will allow access for development.

In fact, there are suspicions that the mountain hasn’t been sold at all.

If Parks Board attempt to expropriate the land then they will have to pay fair market value for it (they’ve offered R500,000). It has been suggested that the auction sale could be a ploy to make the ‘fair market value’ seem higher.

Interesting stuff.

How do wooden buildings hundreds of years old still stand

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A Japanese Pagoda

A pagoda is a tall and often very old structure built entirely out of wood.

They are common in Japan and some are extremely old. For example “Horyuji pagoda in Nara was built in 607 and is thought to be the oldest multi-storey wooden structure in the world.”

The Economist has an article explaining just how these structures have managed to survive hundreds of years of typhoons and earthquakes.

Summary:

To withstand very heavy rains the eaves are extended way beyond the building’s width – about 70% beyond!
- This prevents rain water from weakening the foundations
The floors are not actually attached. They are simply stacked on top of eachother and held down by the weight of the heavy tiles on the roof
- This allows each floor to move during an earthquake without breaking up
There is a central pillar known as a shinbashira that (normally) rests on the ground
- This pillar prevents the shifting floors from sliding off eachother and also transmits the energy into the ground.

It’s a fascinating article and a good example of why The Economist is so great.

Zuma’s empty election promises causing unrest

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AWB was better than ANC poster

The Economist has an article on Zuma, South Africa, and the recession.

Summary:

The current recession means that many of Zuma’s grand campaign promises are falling aside
This is causing serious problems among the impatient poor masses
It is also causing problems among his powerful left leaning COSATU and communist allies
The fact that Tito Mboweni is leaving (suspiciously timed) suggests that perhaps Zuma is giving in to pressure
It will be crucial to see if Zuma is able to “hold his left-wing allies in check” during the recession

In short, my take is this:

South Africa is full of poor people (40% of our population is below the poverty line).

These poor masses are impatient to improve their lot. They also believe that this is their right and will happen fast.

Many believe their current situation to be the direct result of past injustice
They have all been promised quick and drastic change by the ANC

With good governance and hard work their lot should improve – but only over time.

This is a problem because:

We do not have good governance. Especially at the extremely important municipal level we often have shockingly bad governance
The ANC promises unrealistic and quick results. Zuma made lots of mad promises during the campaign which are now falling by the wayside

So we have an already impatient, poor and jobless population being continually disappointed you surely have a recipe for unrest and possible disaster?

Readability bookmarklet

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web-content-small These days reading content online can quite a pain. The content that we want is lost in an ocean of junk (see image).

On top of that every site has different text styling, text sizing, etc, etc.

I recently came across a great solution: Readability.

Readability is a ‘bookmarklet’ that will update any site you’re looking at to be more readable.

This is how it works:

You choose some preferences up front (i.e. font size and type)
Drag the link provided onto your browser links bar
When you’re reading a site with a lot of gunk hit the bookmark
Readability will update the site to make it more readable

Basically the program will go through the page and extract the ‘content’ and then show only that content according to your formatting preferences.

In the example image here Readability would find the blue block and then show then content of that block according to your preferences.

Because the program must figure out which content is relevant this process doesn’t work every time. Some sites are not compatible.

That said, I find Readability very useful and often make use of it.

Lost wallets with baby photos more likely to be returned

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This article reports on an experiment investigating the impact of various photos in lost wallets.

240 wallets were distributed on the streets (in Britain). Each wallet had the same random items in it, but no cash.

The only difference was a single photo included:

Photo of a baby: 88% of wallets returned
Photo of a puppy: 53% of wallets returned
Photo of a family: 48% of wallets returned
Photo of an elderly couple: 28% of wallets returned
Card showing recent charity giving: 20% of wallets returned
Control with no extra items: 15% of wallets returned

Even in such a small experiment the baby photo obviously had a significant emotional impact on those who found the wallets.

Irrational human nature at work again.

Google operating system – coming soon

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Google has just announced that they are developing an operating system for release in 2010. When it comes to Google nothing surprises me anymore!

The Idea

The idea is to create a simple, fast and free operating system for users who do everything online.

Windows is bulky, complex and fragile because it was developed for a world where each computer must bundle everything the user needs.

The Google OS is being designed for a world where users do everything online. By removing the bulk and complexity you get an operating system that is very fast, secure and stable.

Why it will work

It is important to note that the Google OS is currently targeted at netbooks (tiny, cheap, portable laptops). This is the perfect market for an OS like Google’s and it should pave the way.

There are still plenty of reasons to think that Google’s operating system is stupid.

1. We need Word and Excel

Meet Google Docs. Google and others have developed replacements for the essential desktop tools. Word, Excel, calendar, email, Powerpoint – they’ve all got working online replacements. It’s no coincidence that Google just brought Google Apps out of beta.

I’m even writing this text online – not in Word!

2. What if I’m offline?

Even in an increasingly wired world we are sometimes going to be offline. What then?

Meet Google Gears. Not many people know it, but Google has produced software that allows web applications to be used even when offline! Gears is still in it’s infancy, but it when applied correctly it works.

3. Net speeds are increasing all the time

To really work we need bandwidth and lots of it. Luckily that is happening anyway (although not fast enough in South Africa)

Why are they doing this?

Google is releasing the operating system for free and open source. They’re doing us a huge favour for nothing! Why?

Google needs us all to be online. They want a world where everyone does everything online where they dominate. Fine by me.

Incredible air crash survival story

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In the wake of the recent miracle survival in the Yemenia Flight 626 crash I came across this even more amazing crash survival.

Summary:

In 1971 Juliane Köpcke was in a plane that broke apart 3km above the Amazon jungle
She found herself in free fall while still strapped into a row of seats – she remembers seeing the jungle spinning below her
She landed in thick jungle and lost consciousness
She woke up the next morning with cuts, concussion and a broken collarbone as her only injuries
She knew that her best hope was to follow a river downstream which she did for 10 days despite her injuries and having almost no food
Eventually she was found and rescued by Peruvian loggers

That’s pretty amazing stuff!

The Pale Blue Dot – our only home

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I really love this quote about the Earth and how small and insignificant we really are.

It was written by the astronomer Carl Sagan and originally accompanied this picture of Earth (called Pale Blue Dot) taken from more than 6 billion kilometers away!

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Zapping mosquitoes with lasers

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Shooting down mosquitoes with lasers The Economist has an article about anti-mosquito laser defense systems.

Seriously.

The first device described is called a photonic mosquito fence:

A series of posts about 100m apart
Each post has a cheap camera and light source and is connected to a central computer
When a camera detects movements it analyzes the source (mosquito species have distinctive wing-beat frequencies)
If the source is a mosquito the computer “trains a laser onto the insect and blasts it into oblivion”!

That is awesome! Apparently the system is also cheap enough to compete with current malaria protection.

The other system described uses a ‘curtain’ of infra-red light to which mosquitoes are highly sensitive. Also very cool.

Positive thinking works – but only if you believe it

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I believe that a lot of life is a big confidence game.

From sport to public speaking, to work, to relationships I have found that self-belief goes a long way. I call it my confidence trick and it’s worked very well for me.

The Economist has an article outlining experimental results that suggest positive thinking can leave you worse off – if you don’t believe the positive thoughts.

Read the article for details of the experiment, but in short the results were:

High self-esteem => benefit from positive thoughts
Low self-esteem => worse off because of positive thoughts!

The article goes on to suggest that the positive thoughts clash with the self beliefs of those with low self-esteem thereby reinforcing those negative self-perceptions!

Positive thought - works if you believe it So, positive thoughts do help – but only if you believe them.

Pott’s confidence trick has experimental support!

Incidentally, I think that this is the reason that religion is beneficial to many. Religion is a positive thoughts believability engine. The problem is that it so often gets co-opted into ignorant or political ends.