New Orbital. Simple, decent electronic dance music.
The video? Not so amazing.
But that electronic dance music? Simple and decent.
Author: 6000
Science kid
I debated long and hard over whether to share this. On the one hand, as you’ll see, I’m a proud dad right now. On the other, I don’t want it to seem like I am showing off. No-one likes a showoff.
But then no, I don’t do this sort of thing often (despite having great kids) and I do want to shout this from the metaphorical rooftops. If you have a negative opinion on my decision to do so, well, so be it.
The backstory: Earlier in the year, my 10 year old son did a science project for school. He investigated whether using stored grey water to water plants had any effect on their growth. This is important, because at home, we store any spare grey water in order to water the garden, and we don’t want to kill our plants. Topical then; a neat little project which worked out nicely, got him a certificate at school and an invitation (along with a handful of other students) to take it to the Eskom Expo for Young Scientists at UCT.
In the intervening six weeks, the boy wonder addressed the shortfalls in his initial experiment and basically did the whole thing again on a much larger scale, working literally every day throughout the school holidays.
Flash forward to the present day (well, almost): The Eskom Expo happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week. The boy, along with 900 other students, went and set up 492 projects in the infamously chilly UCT Sports Hall.
Part of the Expo setup – from their FB page.
The students then had to present their experiment and were interviewed by several (or more) judges and the projects were graded accordingly.
His school did really, really well at the Expo. And I knew that his was a good project, done well. And look, given the disclaimer above, you can probably kind of guess where this is going. But I had no idea.
He won a gold medal, a special award for one of the best Environmental projects and a special award for one of the best primary school projects. We were astounded.
And then they awarded him the inaugural Priscilla Moodley Award for the Best Primary School Project at the Expo. His was the best project out of the 100 submitted in his age group. Amazing.
So yeah. I’m a proud dad right now. The kid seems to be going places, possibly following his dad into the hopelessly underfunded, but still often rather fun world of science. [screams internally: DON’T DO IT!!!!]
UPDATE: Oh, and because people are asking:
He discovered that the length of time that grey water is stored for (he tested fresh, 1 week and >1 month) has no discernable effect on plant growth, and that any grey water is better than potable water (his control) for both numbers of seeds germinating & average plant height.
Your new desktop?
I flew over some vineyards this morning, while out running with the Western Cape Beagles. I’ve been wanting to fly over a vineyard for a while, and I’m sure that it would be a very different view in summer, but it’s not summer right now.
There’s something quite hypnotic about the rows of vines when viewed from 120m up. Like magnified corduroy. I’ve set the image above as the background on my phone: it really makes the app icons pop. If you want to too (use it as a background, not pop), just click on the image to get to the download page. Help yourself. You’re welcome.
Other photos from the morning here.
And a video (quick and dirty, no editing) of the last run of the morning.
Licenced to k… drive
I went to renew my driver’s licence today. It’s something you have to do every 5 years in South Africa, so that they can extract just a little more cash from your already hard-pressed wallet.
There’s a rather inefficient system in place to get the all important card. Firstly, you have to stand in a queue to get a DL1 form. It would be nice if you could get this online and fill it in in advance, but you can’t. So there.
Once you’ve completed DL1, you get to join queue two. That’s the eye test queue. Each eye test takes 4½ minutes, on average, so it’s not a quick queue. Still, you had nothing better to do with your Saturday morning than stand in another line, right? Right.
Only once you’ve passed your eye test with flying colours can you move on to the third queue. That’s the payment queue.
You’d think that simply handing over R140 would be a fairly speedy, uncomplicated task, but they seem to take quite a while considering the straightforward deal.
Open another payment window?
I think not.
And what do you get when you’ve paid? A piece of paper that you can hand back to them at a future date once they’ve printed your licence.
Of course, when that time comes, you will have to stand in a queue to pick it up.
Yep. If there’s something that the system to renew your driver’s licence in South Africa is trying to tell the general public, it’s definitely Four Queue.
Back down to earth
Even as I begin this blog post, I have no idea what it will be about. How exciting is that?
“What a rebel! What a firebrand! How does he do it?” I hear the audience marvel.
I do know what it won’t be about though: flight. It suddenly struck me that my last three posts had all involved flight, and that I was inadvertently drifting higher and higher: 120m with my Mavic, 40,000ft on that Dreamliner and then about 408km for the International Space Station. This wasn’t at all intentional, it just happened that way.
Anyway, it could be that this post actually ends up being about not knowing what it is going to be about. I’ve been sidetracked so many times since I began writing it (picking fantasy football side, answering emails, doing lab work), that I’m now running out of time to complete it before I have other places to be.
Quota photo?
Quota photo.
How about another one of those Brittany lighthouses?
This one is La Vieille – the Old Lady – off the Pointe du Raz, and forms part of a chain of lighthouses guiding ships safely around the end of Brittany:
There you go. Not a wing, rocket or rotor blade in sight.