Category Archives: Uncategorized

No chocolate in a Chomp

chomp

There is no chocolate in a Cadburys Chomp.

Check for yourself. According to the wrapper a Chomp is: “Delicious Wafer Biscuit and Caramel covered in a Chocolate Flavoured Coating”.

A little research revealed that Chomps are coated in a substance known as compound chocolate. Compound chocolate is basically a cheaper and easier alternative to the real deal.

In fact, a little more Googling reveals that Chomps are really bottle of the barrel stuff. This article from “The Chocolate Blog” made me feel cheap for liking Chomps…

Tell people to vote against the ANC

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It seems to be established that you shouldn’t tell people who to vote for.

Bull.

You should vote DA or COPE.

There. I said it… Whatever you do, vote against this guy and his party.

malema-anc

It’s true that you shouldn’t intimidate or force people to vote your way. But, in my opinion, you should try to persuade them to vote the right way. That’s democracy.

It’s their vote, but your responsibility to get them to use it wisely!

The ANC are a corrupt, inept and dangerous in government. However, because of our country’s history the ANC are assured of an election victory again.

There are several reasons why you should still vote against the ANC:

To stop them from getting a 66% majority! That would allow them to change our constitution – something they have already threatened to do
To make your voice heard against the corrupt and inept government of the ANC. Votes against the ANC won’t be ignored forever
In some towns and provinces the opposition has a very good change of winning control from useless ANC local or provincial government

As for which opposition party to vote for, choose one that has policies you agree with. Surely you can’t agree with the ANC and their policies? They are nowhere near the party they once were.

I have strong feelings on who you should vote for – suffice it to say that if you vote DA or COPE you are doing your country a favor.

Make sure that you get out there and vote accordingly. And tell other people to do the same.

Our brains appear to solve problems unconsciously

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One day, back when I was a schoolboy, I got stuck with a particularly tricky programming problem. After unsuccessfully puzzling over the problem I decided to take a break and went for a walk with my family.

About an hour later, while chatting about something else entirely, I was suddenly struck by the solution – it just popped into my head. It was an excellent example of the subconscious mind ticking away at a problem.

Since then I have often wondered at how solutions seem to just pop into my mind. When trying to solve a tricky problem or brain-teaser the solution suddenly appears – but from where?

Sometimes I can follow my conscious thought process systematically arriving at a solution – but often it just pops into my consciousness.

The Economist has this fascinating article about an experiment illustrating that the subconscious mind is responsible for at least some problem solving.

Experiment:
Experimental subjects were faced with a brain-teaser had their brains scanned while they attempted to solve the problem.

Results:
Several seconds (up to eight) before a subject had a eureka moment his/her brain waves altered significantly.

Interpretation:
This seems to show that the test subjects had subconsciously solved the problem several seconds before they consciously realized that they had the solution.

We are hopelessly ignorant of the workings of human consciousness. I truly hope that during my lifetime experiments such as this one will reveal this fascinating miracle.

Julius Malema – threatening UCT

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Julius Malema is seriously frightening. The things he says, and the positive attention he gets for saying them make me sad about South Africa.

Yesterday he was at my old university, UCT, threatening to remove the management of the university once the ANC comes into power.

I get angry when I read some of the things this fool says. I get sad when I see how many people in our country agree with his statements…

Quotes from his speech at UCT yesterday:

“Forces that are opposed to our revolution are still here. We must change the management of this university and also the lecturers.”
“Don’t provoke us, it is us (ANC) who brought the nonsensical apartheid regime down. No opposition (party) will ever defeat the ANC. We want them all to combine so that we can defeat them”

Julius Malema: 100% for Zuma, 20% for woodwork

Persistence hunting – humans running antelope to death

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Kalahari bushman after a successful persistence hunt of a male kudu A while ago I watched a David Attenborough documentary that showed a bushman man running a Kudu to death. It was pretty amazing stuff – by persistently chasing the kudu through the heat of the day he was able to exhaust it to the point of collapse.

(Watch that part of the documentary on YouTube – 7 minutes)

I was very impressed (and sorry for the Kudu) but assumed that this was highly unusual.

It turns out that in ancient history persistence hunting (as it is known) was actually very common. In fact some anthropologists believe humans hunted in this way before they had tools such as spears and bows.

Our bodies are so well adapted to endurance running (especially in hot conditions where prey easily overheat) that these anthropologists believe persistence hunting was an evolutionary force in humans. It seems we are specifically evolved to be able to run a large antelope into heat exhaustion.

Some examples (many more in the other articles):

Running on two legs is slower in a sprint, but more efficient over long distances
Humans have toes that are far shorter than all other primates. This has been shown to be a big advantage – but only when running over distance
Hairless bodies and our all over sweating allows running in the heat. Antelope aren’t nearly as efficient at getting rid of heat – they must stop to pant

Interesting stuff. Here is another short article on the subject.

I recommend Loot.co.za for online book purchases

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I regularly buy books online. It’s much cheaper and often easier than buying books in stores. The best site for buying books online in South Africa is Loot.co.za. Definitely better than Kalahari.net.

I still browse book stores all the time. This is my process:

Find interesting books in a store. Take a photo with my phone to remind myself later
Look up all interesting books on Amazon to read reviews
If I want a book add it to a wishlist on Loot.co.za
When I have a few books on the wishlist I put through an an order

This process helps to ensure that I get great books. Using Loot ensures that I get EXCELLENT prices. I highly recommend these guys – they run an excellent operation.

Price
Until recently I would always shop around the find the cheapest prices before buying books. I soon realised that was a waste of time – Loot is always the cheapest. Every single time.

Take my latest book order. I saved R116 (about 20%) by ordering through Loot.co.za!

Item	Kalahari	Loot
Out of Africa (Karen Blixen)	R173	R113
A History of South Africa (Leonard Thompson)	R153	R140
The pig that wants to be eaten (Julian Baggini)	R105	R93
Tales of the Unexpected (Roald Dahl)	R105	R93
Overnight delivery*	Free	R8
TOTAL	R563	R447

Delivery
Loot has several delivery options and they stack up well against Kalahari. On my last order overnight delivery to me costed R8! Post office delivery is normally free.

I’ve had no problems with deliveries from Loot.co.za

Disclosure
I highly recommend using Loot.co.za. In the process of writing this blog post I found that I can get vouchers for referring Loot. I thought it only reasonable to disclose that if you click the Loot.co.za links in this post (and make an order) then I’ll get a R8 voucher… Trust me, that’s not why I wrote the post.

National Geographic visions of the Earth

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Each edition of National Geographic Magazine has a section called Visions of the Earth – basically a collection of great photos from around the world.

I was looking over some of the older ones and was blown away by some of them. Here are a handful of the best.

This one was taken with the lens half submerged. If it wasn’t from National Geographic I wouldn’t believe it was real. I’m still skeptical…
National Geographic picture of a fisherman

This is one of the best photos I’ve seen. I had to read the explanation to understand what was going on. It’s taken near sunset in the deserts of South Africa. There is a massive sand dune rising in the sunlight in the background.
dunes

Alligator claw. Awesome.

There are many other excellent pictures, but I restricted this post to three that I really liked.

Devils peak fire – a little too close

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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

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The 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.

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

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Darwin Change poster I 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.