Venus, Jupiter and the moon had a little party last night – it was a pretty cool site. The clouds were moving in rapidly but I managed to snap a few photos of the unusual arrangement over Cape Town.
I love getting stuff done online. These days you can conveniently get quite a lot done online – pay traffic fines, tax returns, book holidays, etc, etc, etc.
NetFlorist is a very useful website that makes sending flowers (and other gifts) pretty easy to do. I use NetFlorist regularly to send flowers to family members and it’s always been a pleasure.
Their site is well organised and they have many sections, but I normally just use the specials on the front page. Delivery is R40 and they will deliver the flowers to the door on the right day.
Another cool feature is that they remember anniversaries/birthdays and will remind you again next year. Nice.
The Economist has this short article on what a circus Swaziland is. The tiny country (population 1m) that we hardly ever even notice is badly run by King Mswati III who wields absolute power.
Here are some facts from the article:
The place is an absolute dog show, but you won’t hear a peep of criticism from our leaders.
Stones in glass houses perhaps?
I tried out my new Garmin Forerunner heart rate monitor last night. I went for a quick run around the neighborhood and then uploaded the run onto my laptop. Pretty impressive.
I purposefully ran along the same road twice but on different sides of the road. The results easily show that my route used different sides of the road.
I started my run at one end of our ‘driveway’ and ended it at the other end (about 15m apart). Not only did the results show a clear difference between the two points, but also that there is an altitude difference of a couple meters!
This morning I uploaded the route onto MapMyRun.com and was pretty pleased with the results. You can view an interactive version of the map on their site (no heart rate and speed information though).
Can’t wait to get into the mountains this weekend.
The Economist has this article about a study confirming the ‘broken windows effect‘ Basically the idea is that “observing disorder can have a psychological effect on people”.
The “tendency for people to behave in a particular way can be strengthened or weakened depending on what they observe others to be doing.”
This makes intuitive sense to me. I even see it with dirty dishes. If a few dishes accumulate in the sink then we are more likely to let more accumulate there. Before you know it, leaving a couple of dirty dishes in the sink has lead to a sink full of dirty dishes.
When applied to policing, the idea is that by getting on top of petty crimes like graffiti, littering police can prevent other crimes. It makes intuitive sense but had not actually been proven – until now.
Read the article for details on the experiments (which were quite clever).
The first experiment involved observing people passing through an alley. Some littering was observed when the alley was freshly painted but littering was more than doubled in the same alley when the walls were tagged with graffiti.
Another experiment showed that letting off fireworks during a time when they are prohibited increased littering substantially.
In the final experiment people were twice as likely to steal €5 from a postbox if the postbox was covered in graffiti. The same increase was even observed when the postbox was clear but there was litter around it!
Amazing.
I recently decided to treat myself to a heart rate monitor. After lots of research I ‘justified’ getting one with a built in GPS so that I could track speed, distance, etc while out running in the mountains. To cut a long story short I used the excellent jump.co.za to find the cheapest source.
I found that I could get the Garmin Forerunner 305 from a shop called EasyGIS for a LOT less than anywhere else. It was more than R600 cheaper than Sportsman’s Warehouse or Kalahari.net! Amazing.
Only problem was that EasyGIS is a small outfit that has little reputation, so I was a little worried about problems. I got a good feeling from the guy on the other side of their emails so I took a chance. I have to say that I was very happy with the results:
In short, if you are considering buying a Garmin GPS item then I recommend checking out EasyGIS.
If you are looking into EasyGIS then rest assured – they are a quality outfit.
I can’t wait to try this baby out!Everyone knows that there is a financial crisis – very few people understand what is going on or what happened. This is a really good flowchart that helps to explain things in what I think is a simple way.
I highly recommend clicking through and spending 5 minutes reading the flowchart. It’s well worth it.
Click through to read this great flowchart outlining the story behind the financial crisis. Excellent stuff.
This is a pretty cool video visualizing global commercial flights over a 24 hour period. It’s pretty amazing to see just how much air travel there is. And how much of it is between the States and Europe.
Click through to see the actual video. Yellow dots are individual flights.
Visualization of commercial flights around the world. Yellow dots are individual flights
As if they weren’t mean enough, now it emerges that sabertooths were probably pack animals
Sabertooths were frightening beasts. About the size of tigers (huge) and with enormous 20cm fangs these guys were mean. And if that isn’t enough, new research suggests that they were pack animals like modern lions (the Ice Age movies had it right).
How they worked that out is a little complex:
So basically, by comparing the ratios of sabertooth remains in the tar pits with the study in Africa the researchers could take an educated guess that sabertooths lived in packs.
Dresden in early 1945. Complete devastation but there are plenty of unexploded bombs down there
Here is an interesting article about a guy who has worked for 40 years as a bomb disposal expert in Germany. During World War II 1.9 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany and a surprisingly high number of them (5 to 15 percent) didn’t explode.
After the war Germany was in such a hurry to rebuild that authorities didn’t have the time or the means to locate and dispose of the bombs. The result is that every year about 2,000 tons of munitions are found and must be safely disposed of!
There are full time teams of disposal experts who get 2 or 3 calls a day from people who have found unexploded munitions. Everything from bombs, to grenades, to mines.
Especially dangerous are delayed-action bombs which were designed to explode 2 to 146 hours after being dropped (to disrupt clearing up and to cause extra chaos). The way many of them landed meant that they have been lying just under the ground on a hair-trigger every since.
Madness to get into a job like that.
Many types of munitions are defused – including some huge bombs
Dropped more than 60 years ago, the bombs are still killing. This bulldozer set off a bomb during road works.
There is a gallery with several more pictures here.