Talking Heads

February 18th, 2010 in and · 0 Comments

I attended Talking Heads this evening, part of the Infecting the City Festival, courtesy of 2 Couchsurfers who were staying with me, and were part of the festival. Billed as speed dating for the brain, the format sees you sit at a table for 20 minutes each with 4 different, hopefully interesting, people, from all walks of life. The brief: “this information could change your life”.

None of the Talking Heads managed to change my life in any kind of dramatic way, but the event was interesting, getting better for me as it went along.

First up was Ronald Suresh Roberts. I was a little disappointed to find out that it wasn’t just me at the table, that I’d be joined by another person at each. Suresh started talking about legal rights and legal rites, the subject of a new book he is writing.

The talk didn’t work for the format too well, and rambled a bit back and forth, and before it had really got started it was over. Given another chance, I’d leap straight in to questioning him about his (in)famous book, Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, and his generally fractuous dealings with the press.

Next up was Reinette Steyn, a clinical psychologist, who gave a brief introduction, then handed over to the two of us for questions. Much of the time was spent discussing the other participants son, and the time was up quickly.

By half time, I was a bit disappointed. Partly to blame was my interaction style. I remember having the same feeling at a recent radio interview. The presenter was filling space, talking, and I was letting him talk, but the format calls for more forceful interaction, since there’s limited time.

After the break was someone from the Bicycling Empowerment Network (I think his name was Andrew), an NGO which promotes cycling, as a means of poverty alleviation, and a generally healthy, green activity.

But the best was reserved for last. Jonathan Shapiro, Zapiro himself. He talked about crossing lines, and, peppered with his cartoons, the conversation went from the Muhammed cartoons, to some of Zapiros edgier creations, the backlash he’s faced from various communities, as well as his not always smooth interactions with newspaper editors.

Being the last, we could carry on well over the allotted 20 minutes, and gathered a crowd from the other tables, all enjoying Zapiro’s cartoons and the stories behind them.

Overall an enjoyable event. It’s held three times a year, so look out for the next one.



The Windows treadmill

February 4th, 2010 in · 3 Comments

I own a laptop that came bundled with Windows Vista. I installed Linux as fast as possible, but left Windows as a dual-boot option mainly to check that things behave nicely in Internet Explorer.

And a good thing too, because they usually don’t.

I also keep it because I own some junk hardware that also doesn’t play nicely with Linux.

I boot into it about once a month – the last time was mid-December. I always enter with trepidation, knowing I’m about to install countless Gigs of security and anti-virus updates.

This evening I booted into Windows at 22h02, and immediately kicked off the Windows, Windows Defender and AVG updates. The updates finished around 00h30, and I’ve probably blown February’s bandwidth.

Shortly after finishing, I was alerted to another update. It seems they arrive faster than I can download them.

About an hour into downloading the patch for the latest gaping hole, a dialer popped up, so a hole was probably exploited in the interim.

I’m now scanning the entire system – who knows how long that will take. Perhaps I was a bit ambitious in hoping to get back to what I was doing by, say, 22h05.

For the average user, who perhaps doesn’t appreciate Freedom, or ever run into the frustrations of not having complete control of their system, there are still two huge advantages to running Linux.

One is having access to tonnes of fantastic software in one place – the default repositories. No need to trawl the internet for dodgy freeware, or head off to Incredibly Expensive software shop to buy something that’s freely available.

The other, of course, is that the obligatory anti-virus software takes up a rather large proportion of the system’s resources, and uses up a nice chunk of your bandwidth too.

And unless you use the machine regularly (and therefore update regularly), the chances of exploitation, even if you immediately install the updates when you do log on, are high.

The scan’s still running. Perhaps I should get this blog post up before my Windows partition is formatted…

Related posts:



We are Stars

January 19th, 2010 in · 1 Comment

The 3rd in Don Kurtz’s excellent series of lectures moved outwards, towards the edge of the universe. While the first was a brief romp through the history of astronomy, and the second focused on the wonders of our nearest star, the 3rd looked outward towards the stars and beyond.

There’s $600 million spent on each space shuttle launch, and a recent mission focused on the Hubble telescope. A relatively small telescope in size, but, situated in space, it has a clear view out into the universe, unhindered by our ever-smoggier atmosphere. Our eyes are relatively limited in the range of light we can see – there’s infra-red (heat) on one side, and ultra-violet on the other. The Hubble telescope can detect infra-red light, and there are some amazing pictures being sent back.

It’s currently thought that when the universe formed, only Hydrogen and Helium elements existed. Other elements are cooked up in nuclear reactions in stars, and flung out across the universe. So, in a very real sense, we are star-born, and couldn’t exist otherwise. Certain, very rare, elements, are only created when a star goes supernova – platinum and gold.

The Hubble telescope is returning the most phenomenal pictures – galaxies lit up as a star goes nova, emitting light, and, year by year, as the light travels a light year further out, the galaxy lights up revealing more of its secrets. Stars that are revealed to be entire galaxies, and again stars in these that appear to be galaxies, as we look deeper and deeper in space.

The latest telescope can see galaxies 13 billion light years away, believed to be close to the very edge of the universe. The next generation will see beyond this, and, if galaxies are seen even further out, the model of the universe’s expansion as currently understood will have to be rewritten.

At the same time, Kurtz is part of a team looking for earth-like planets. He said that he couldn’t reveal anything yet as he has signed a non-disclosure agreement, but, in a future year will return with the findings. The method is simple, but wasn’t possible without the latest high-powered telescopes. Look for a star similar to the sun. Look for planets crossing its face, and see when they return again. An earth year later, and about the same size, and you’ve got an earth-like planet.

Looking into space is looking into the past – what we see is what existed at various points in the past. Galaxies could have collided, stars could have gone supernova – we wouldn’t see it until its light gets here. When we look at the nearest star besides the sun, we’re looking 4 and half years into the past. When we look into deep space, we’re looking 13 billion years into the past. Space-time indeed.

To end off the series, here are some videos.


Images from Hubble


Images from Hubble 2


Hubble Deep Space

Related posts:



Global warming and the Sun

January 18th, 2010 in · 0 Comments

The second in Don Kurtz’s excellent series of lectures focused on the plain, ordinary old sun. Now reaching middle-aged, 4.6 billion years old with about another 5 and a half to go, the sun is wondrously active and mysterious. Unlike the earth, which rotates at the same speed at the equator and the poles, because of the sun’s gaseous form it rotates faster at the equator (26 days) than at the poles (35 days). This leads to a highly complex magnetic structure, with the sunspots in essence being where the magnetic loops bulge out of the surface of the sun, forming an area of lower temperature.

Much of the lecture consisted of phenomonal pictures from SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a satellite constantly aimed at the sun, and the source of much new recent knowledge about our nearest star. Pictures and videos are available online.

Sunspot activity goes in an approximately 11-year cycle. At the beginning of the cycle, sunspots form in bands around 30 degrees from the equator. As the cycle progresses, new sunspots form closer and closer to the poles. The cycle is actually 22 years, as the sun’s polarity flips every 22 years, but this seems to have little effect as far as the earth is concerned.

In his lecture, Don Kurtz summarised the connection between the sunspot cycle and global warming by saying that although the sun does have an impact on global temperature (he mentioned a figure of 0.2 degrees), there’s a far stronger correlation between the level of greenhouse gases (0.6 degrees).

Being a short lecture of 1 hour only, he couldn’t go into it in much more detail, but there’s quite a lot of complexity, and it’s often this complexity that those trying to reach a particular conclusion latch onto when claiming that humans have little or no impact on global warming, or, more ridiculously, that global warming isn’t happening. There’re the Milankovitch cycles, variations of the earth’s orbit, there’s volcanic activity (and, more recently, pollution), which has a cooling effect by reflecting heat away from the earth. There are longer, and as yet relatively speculative, solar cycles.

Much of the complexity comes from looking at what we know, and trying to model what we imperfectly know, or would like to test, and seeing how everything fits. We have fairly accurate temperatature records going back historically. We have fairly accurate carbon dioxide records. But when it comes to the sun, the records are much less accurate.

Sunspot records go back to the 17th century, and the 11-year cycle is clear over this entire period, but there’s information missing in the older records. Sunspots are cooler areas (due to the magnetic effect), but there’s a converse effect – solar faculae, which are the bright spots. These are hotter than normal, but have only been recorded more recently. There’s a correlation between the two cycles, but it’s not perfect, so the records can’t accurately be extrapolated back to the 17th century.

Early scientists were particularly cautious about reaching any conclusions, given how imperfect much of their knowledge was. Some actively tried to show that the sun was predominantly responsible for global warming, such as Sami Solanki, but, after 15 years of research, he was forced to conclude that the sun was not to blame. Now however, there’s little doubt that greenhouse gases have a causal effect on global warming.

After briefly tackling global warming, the highly enjoyable lecture raced onto the Van Allen belts, the bands of highly-charged particles kept from hitting the earth by the earth’s magentic field, and some stunning pictures of the Aurora Borealis, the polar lights. This lead of course to solar storms, with huge amounts of matter blasted from the sun. These happen regularly, but when they’re aimed at the earth, the equivalent of trillions of watts of power arrive in the earth’s atmosphere. The Aurora Borealis go berserk. And, if the storm is strong enough, satellite, radio transmissions, and power transmissions will be affected.

The most recent large storm was in 1989, and it knocked out Quebec’s power grid. Computers were also affected, with the storm frying Toronto’s stock market system.

A far, far bigger one happened in 1859 and, if such a storm is repeated, let’s just say you want be reading this online for a while.

Related posts:



Of burst bladders and tokamak stellerators

January 15th, 2010 in · 1 Comment

The tokamak stellerator is going to save humanity!

In essence, this was the conclusion of a highly enjoyable lecture by Donald Kurtz, the first of a series of three lectures at the UCT Summer School, entitled The Stars are Ours (named after a novel by Andre Norton, who I’d previously mistakenly assumed to be a man).

The lecture was a romp through astronomical history, starting in a dark room with the death of Copernicus, who placed the sun at the centre of the solar system, moving on to his successor Tycho Brahe, who as well as being a master of astronomical observations was also a despot who kept a pet dwarf, chained families in his dungeon, lost his nose in a duel and is suspected to have died of a burst bladder after being unwilling to breach etiquette and leave a banquet early to relieve himself.

The rather more sober Johannes Kepler followed, codifier of the laws of planetary motion, Galileo, Newton, Jeremiah Horrocks, the journeys of Captain Cook (being able to triangulate observations from different points on the globe was important in accurately measuring distance to the various astronomical bodies), before finally leaping into quantum physics, and intriguingly, how quantum physics helped explain how nuclear fusion powers the sun.

All of which leads back to the tokamak stellerator, which will replicate the power of the sun to generate immense amounts of energy. Engineers will be relieved to learn that it’s merely an engineering problem now, as the physics has been solved. Unfortunately, the engineers are lagging, as no current tokamak stellerators produce more energy than they consume in cooling, but, according to Kurtz, a breakthrough is imminent, perhaps even this century!

Related posts:



From Hardy to Helena

January 8th, 2010 in · 0 Comments

I’ve recently upgraded my Lenovo Y510 from Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy, which I’ve been running since around May 2008, to Linux Mint 8, Helena (which is based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10). I used to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu every 6 months, but it got a bit tiring keeping up on the upgrade treadmill, running around fixing things, especially things that worked before. I decided to stick to the Long-Term Support version (LTS), as the intermediate versions tend to have more regressions.

With Hardy, there were ongoing annoyances I’d learnt to live with. My screen brightness modifier worked the wrong way around (brighter was dimmer). Flash in the browser caused problems with sound (Flash 9 didn’t work well with PulseAudio), and I’d have to close the browser to get it working again. My webcam image was upside down. Firefox would eventually consume all available memory and need to be restarted. The system was unresponsive for a few seconds after booting up. When wireless was off, it would be on, and I’d need to flip the switch to on and then off again to really switch it off.

I’ve been meaning to try Linux Mint for a while, to see whether I could recommend it to complete beginners. Ubuntu was fine, but for beginners, especially if I just gave them the CD and they installed it themselves, installing all the extra codecs to get music and DVD’s playing properly was often problematic.

At first glance, Helena looked great. Based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, it’s more polished, booted faster, and was more responsive. Little touches such as the volume control not taking up a huge chunk in the middle of the screen – rather appearing neatly in the corner, the consolidated menu bars freeing up a few extra pixels, or the improved menu, all add up to a noticeable improvement. Most of the little Hardy annoyances seemed to be taken care of (except for the webcam and the off-on-off wireless).

It didn’t last long though. Sound was a complete mess, breaking seemingly at random at some point in the session. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio has been ranting about Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio since they first implemented it in Hardy. He also blamed application developers, in particular Skype and Flash. He was equally displeased in the buildup to Karmic.

The blame-game goes back and forth, with criticism of PulseAudio equally vociferous, and all sorts of contrary advice floating around (much of it around uninstalling PulseAudio).

Next, the system, although starting off more responsively, degraded very quickly. Whereas beforehand I’d have Firefox open with 30 tabs for most of the day before running into trouble, things fell apart much quicker. Even worse, once the browser hung, I couldn’t just click “X” to close it, and have to manually kill it to close it down. The disease spread to other applications, all needing to be killed manually.

So, in short, lots of little improvements, but two rather large regressions.

Fixing these though proved trivial. For me, two little fixes seem to have helped – installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (over libsdl1.2debian-alsa), and instead o using the buggy version 2.0.x of Skype, which doesn’t work well with PulseAudio, rather installing the beta 2.1.x. Thankfully at least Flash 10 works with PulseAudio (Flash 9 didn’t, causing the sound problems mentioned above). Now, both the sound and the related memory problems have gone away.

So although I seem to have a stable system now, and am personally happy with Helena, it still took a bit of fiddling around, beyond what the average user would be comfortable doing. It’s getting closer though and, hopefully, with Lucid Lynx 10.04 being a LTS release, sound will finally be a painless experience for most people.



Rawlicious

December 20th, 2009 in · 1 Comment

I’ve recently got a copy of Rawlicious, the raw recipe book from Peter and Beryn Daniel, of Superfoods fame. I did their Elements of Health course last year.

The recipe book (I have to stop myself calling it a cookbook each time) is superb. It’s visually stunning. It includes little snippets of nutritional information. It contains their personal stories. It’s printed locally, on to my knowledge the “greenest” local paper available. And the recipes?

I have a number of other recipe books I really enjoy. The pick are Heaven’s Banquet, Living in the Raw – Desserts and most importantly Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine. However, I tend to page disconsolately through all these books, my larder seemingly hopelessly understocked, as I don’t have such vital ingredients as Turkish apricots, Black Mission Figs, arrowroot and orange zest.

Since I tend to order everything I eat online from the Ethical Co-op, and am not the kind of person to race around the city looking for particular ingredients, rather making do with what I have, that’s a problem. My attempts to replace the ingredients with something I think is similar have tended to end with a less than satisfactory experience.

Rawlicious is different. Most of the ingredients are easily available locally and are fairly simple to prepare. Simple, colourful, tasty, all adding up to a fantastic experience. Just like I’ve cleaned out my shelves of all the food I’m not going back to, it’s time for a cook book clearout, with Rawlicious taking pride of place.

It’s available from their site for R265.

Related posts:



Learning Toki Pona

December 4th, 2009 in , and · 0 Comments

I’m learning Toki Pona. Most people seem to think Toki Pona is a massage technique, some sort of tantric practise, or a musical instrument.

It must be the Polynesian-sounding name, but it’s more exciting than that!

Toki Pona is a constructed language, similar to its more famous relatives such as Esperanto and Interlingua. Anyone who knows me is probably smiling wryly, as I’ve also announced on this blog that I’ve been learning Mandarin, Xhosa and Spanish at various times. The fact that on Wednesday I thought someone speaking Spanish was actually speaking Italian tells you how far those have got.

But Toki Pona looks interesting, and achievable.

I’ve been interested in constructed languages for a while, with Interlingua previously being my favoured choice. The reason was mainly pragmatic, with it being my understanding that learning Interlingua is more useful for picking up other natural languages than the more widely spoken Esperanto.

Interlingua didn’t even get as far as an announcement on my blog.

But Toki Pona is different. It’s not the mind speaking, or the desire to visit Taiwan or Argentina, or have a better understanding of my own city. This is love! Toki Pona is a new language first published in 2001. Its designer is a young linguist and translator who has previously translated the Tao Te Ching into both English and Esperanto.

The well-known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the language we use affects the way we think about the world. One of the more famous examples provided is the Hopi concept of time. Hopi language apparently treats time as a single process rather than distinct, countable units. It doesn’t therefore have any nouns for units of time, and the theory goes that this language construct is fundamental to all aspects of Hopi culture and explains certain behaviour differences.

Toki Pona is inspired by Taoist thought, and its goal is to shape our thought in a Zen-like fashion. The language is extremely simple (a key point of attraction for me!), and highly ambiguous. There are only 120 root words, so a sentence such as mi moku could mean I eat, I ate (there are no tenses) or I am food (the word could be a verb or a noun), amongst others.

The idea is to focus on the essence rather than the detail, which can be divisive in Zen thought.

Counting is similarly simple. There’s only ala (zero), wan, tu (say them out loud!) and mute (many).

The idea is that higher numbers are abstract and disconnected from reality. Are 978 seeds any different conceptually to 992? Toki Pona is described as embracing the natural flow of the universe and looking at the deeper patterns of reality.

It’s simplicity also helps to clarify certain problematic concepts. Take a bad friend for example. In Toki Pona, a friend is literally a good person, so the concept of bad friend is problematic. We’re forced to re-evaluate and perhaps not become judgemental so easily.

Sounds to me like toki pona li toki pona. Let’s see how it goes.

Related posts:



Hopeful Monsters

November 22nd, 2009 in · 0 Comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve come across a book so unexpectedly startling as Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters.

At the end of it, I find myself wordless and in awe, as if I’d experienced a flash of satori, wanting to but unable to say anything of the insight.

I can find surprisingly little written about the book.

It won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1990, in itself surprising, since the Whitbread was supposed to be (at least then) a more populist alternative to the Booker Prize.

I can hardly imagine a less populist book.

Mosley resigned from the Booker Prize judging panel in 1991, claiming that all his choices had been rejected, as they were novels of ideas, or novels in which characters were subservient to ideas… Explaining later, My point was that humans were beings who did have ideas, who were often influenced by ideas, to whom ideas were important. If they were not, then there was some lack in being human.

The description fits Hopeful Monsters perfectly, a novel of grand ideas.

After finishing, I found myself wondering if Mosley was related to Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader. It turns out he was his son, but became one of his harshest critics.

I can’t find the words to describe the book. I don’t think I can do more than hint that it’s fundamentally about the mystery of consciousness, and share the experience of awe.

Related posts:



All hail a break in routine

October 26th, 2009 in · 1 Comment

I live in Cape Town, where they say it rains all winter, and blows all summer. Thunderstorms and hailstorms are something those living upcountry get to experience in all their glory. I remember working in Middleburg and standing outside in awe to watch the dramatic lightning storms.

Nothing like that happens in Cape Town, right?

Perhaps not, but I’ve just seen the largest hailstones I’ve ever seen in Cape Town, the size of teeth.

It’s been a strange day. I woke up at 03h45 for a 05h00-06h00 appearance on Radio 2000. That routine that I tempted fate with last time has officially bitten the dust.

Instead of a steady 3am-11am sleep, my routine has been more like this:

  • After being up for 24 hours, go to bed 8am on Friday
  • Get woken at 9am
  • Sleep from 10am to 12am
  • Catch a little more sleep in the afternoon
  • I don’t remember too much of Saturday!
  • Knowing I had to get up up at 4am on Sunday, I wasn’t sure whether to try stay up, or catch some sleep. I eventually settled on the worst of both worlds and stayed up till 00h30 on Sunday morning, waking 03h45 for the interview
  • I’m doing my best to get back to the routine, as, having caught a little bit more sleep in the late morning, I’ve now been up till almost 03h00 on Monday. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m anywhere near ready to go to bed.

It’s not just been me though. Leaving the studio in Sea Point at about 06h45, the day was beautifully calm. Not a breath of wind, I recaptured the joys of early mornings by going for a walk along the promenade.

By afternoon the wind was howling, one of the strongest gales of the year, the sea was foaming and the debris was flying. Fairly normal for summer.

What wasn’t normal was that by night the gale had turned into a hailstorm, with thunder and lightning.

Perhaps, like me, the weather is just trying to settle into a new routine.



« Previous Entries Next Page »
Afrigator