Hiking up Table Mountain – the round route

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The weather was great on Sunday so I decided to try out a new hike. See the map below for the route I took (click for a more interactive map).

It was a cool hike although pretty steep at times and quite long – I would say count on about 3.5 to 4 hours. There was a noticeable difference between the mainstream and lesser known routes up the mountain.

On the route up the back side of the mountain I saw:

  • Two other hikers having a quiet lunch

On the route down Platteklip gorge I saw:

  • About 100 exchange students
  • A whole British rugby team
  • Some Americans struggling along in their jeans and slops
  • An American girl who was hiking in her bra and shorts
  • An Italian girl hiking in bikini bottoms and a t-shirt

Check out some of the pics I took below.

Interesting world clock

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This site calculates running counts of different things happening around the world. For instance while I have been writing this post there have been (and counting):

  • 290 births
  • 99 abortions
  • 9 new HIV infections
  • 182 computers produced
  • 3 deaths in traffic accidents
  • etc, etc

I have seen plenty of these things in the past but this is the most thorough so far.

Robbie Hunter – you are the man

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Our boy Robbie Hunter became the first African to win a stage of the Tour de France yesterday. It was a very entertaining stage and I was pretty excited when I saw that Robbie finally got his win. He has been very close in the some other stages so I was really hoping for it.

Robbie took advantage of the chaos in the stage, avoided a crash on the last corner, and jumped too early but held of the attackers.

As happy as I was, Robbie was clearly much happier than me.

Costs of cocaine around the world

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The Economist has an interesting graph and brief article about the cost of cocaine around the world.

  • The farther away a country from the main producers in South and Central America, and the more isolated it is, the higher the cost to traffick there.
  • Cheapest in Colombia, the world’s biggest producer of coca: at $2, a gram costs less than a Big Mac
  • In far-flung New Zealand, a gram costs a wallet-busting $714.30

Galaxy classification by the crowd

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Galaxy Zoo is a cool site that gets people to classify thousands of telescope photos of distant galaxies. You get some quick training, pass a test and then start classifying galaxies for them.

From the site:

The project harnesses the power of the internet – and your brain – to classify a million galaxies.
You’ll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before (the photos are taken by a robot and analysed by a computer).

The idea is that if real people are doing the classifications then:

  • They will get a pretty accurate classification
  • Anything really interesting will be brought to their attention

Also, all this raises awareness which is pretty cool.

I classified a few – this is the most interesting one that I saw. See explanation below if you really want to.

No – that’s not a UFO it’s the path of a satellite.  It is a streak because the telescope has a long exposure to get as much light as possible.  It’s blue because the telescope actually takes 3 pictures – one for red, one for green, and one for blue and then combines them.  The satellite passed while the telescope was taking the blue frame.