Category: learning curve

Silvermine

Posted on

A quick trip up to Silvermine (because we were in the area) was fairly depressing. The Reserve is closed and will remain so for the foreseeable future after the huge fire. Because it was off-the-cuff, I didn’t take the camera up (maybe I’ll find time for that tomorrow), so please excuse these phone pics. I think they still give you a pretty good idea of the nothingness that remains after the blaze.

Compare that with this pic from last October. It’s all rather barren and moonscapy.

Here’s some more information on the damage to the infrastructure in the Reserve, and a reminder that its closure has many knock on effects, not least the lack of casual employment for Henry, the car park guard there:

Henry Josephs, the car guard at the reservoir parking, is now without a job.  He has been working there for about eleven years and has become a familiar face.  He has been entrusted with car keys and possessions while folks have gone swimming.  He has learnt a lot about the fauna and flora to pass on to visitors. So he was special feature in the parking area.

Incidentally, if you should wish to help Henry out, his banking details are listed at the end of that post.

Mr Henry Josephs
Capitec
1411156208

as well as the contact details of Sue Frew – Chairperson of Friends of Silvermine Nature Area – FOSNA.

Unsurprisingly, because that’s how nature works, there are some green shoots coming through the grey ash. But they’re few and far between at the moment. Aside from tomorrow’s possible visit, I’ll make a plan to get up there again in the next few weeks to see just how much change there has been.

Solo Sarah

Posted on

News reached me via the grapevine (twitter) last night that Saint Etienne singer Sarah Cracknell is doing some solo dates in the UK in June. I think that is a fine reason to share a Saint Etienne video, and I’ve chosen He’s On The Phone (here’s a quick reminder of their other stuff).

The ents24 page for the mini tour gives us some inexplicable detail about Ms Cracknell:

Sarah Cracknell is an English singer-songwriter, best known as the lead singer of the electronic music band Saint Etienne. She is the daughter of Stanley Kubrick’s first assistant director Derek Cracknell.

Now we know.

The five dates are in Bath, London, Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester. That last one is at the Deaf Insitute in Manchester, which seemed rather counter-intuitive until I read up on the history of the place. It seems that historic buildings repurposed as music/drinking venues is a big thing in the UK now.

What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?

Posted on

I think it’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves at one time or other. Fortunately (not least for the residents of midtown Manhattan), it’s one of those scientific queries that’s been explained theoretically, rather than anyone actually having to carry out the act of detonating an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead above midtown Manhattan and standing somewhere nearby with a pen and paper.

Spoiler: It’s not pretty.

A ball of superheated air would form, initially expanding outward at millions of miles per hour. It would act like a fast-moving piston on the surrounding air, compressing it at the edge of the fireball and creating a shockwave of vast size and power.
After one second, the fireball would be roughly a mile in diameter. It would have cooled from its initial temperature of many millions of degrees to about 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 4,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun.

Warm.

At the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, the Chrysler Building, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, about one half to three quarters of a mile from ground zero, light from the fireball would melt asphalt in the streets, burn paint off walls, and melt metal surfaces within a half second of the detonation. Roughly one second later, the blast wave and 750-mile-per-hour winds would arrive, flattening buildings and tossing burning cars into the air like leaves in a windstorm. Throughout Midtown, the interiors of vehicles and buildings in line of sight of the fireball would explode into flames.

The link above takes you to a very neat, and only moderately-dramatic (especially given the rather sensational subject matter) description of what happens bit by bit as you head away from ground zero. I quite like the thought of marble surfaces evaporating. That sounds like something I’d like to see, if not in these exact circumstances.

There’s very little good news here. It’s all rather unpleasant. Under the heading “No Survivors”, the author describes how there would be… well… no survivors:

The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else. Tens of miles downwind of the area of immediate destruction, radioactive fallout would begin to arrive within a few hours of the detonation. But that is another story.

Happy days.

More fire expertise…

Posted on

It turns out that just a couple of weeks before the big Cape Town fire got started above Kalk Bay, a one Dr Simon Pooley was at a bookshop in Kalk Bay, launching his latest book all about fires on Table Mountain.

What? No!
No. I wasn’t saying that at all. Leave me out of the wild accusations formed by your cynical mental gymnastics. I’m sure his book sales would have been superb anyway. Interesting subject.
Topical. Suddenly very topical.

Anyway, when the fires came, Dr P was obviously the go-to guy for some Cape Times column inches – you can read them here (or in PDF here) – in which he told us that fires are (and always have been) a regular part of living next to the Table Mountain National Park:

Fires are by nature sensational news, and nowhere else in South Africa is this more so than on the Cape Peninsula, where a national park protecting fynbos which must burn every 10 to 20 years is bordered by the country’s parliamentary capital city, which must not.

Great line, right there. The rest of it is a good read too. And we’ve already touched on the ecological importance of the fire. But I also liked these few salient points from ‘Die Kaartman’, who (while agreeing with much of what the good doctor said) added to Pooley’s piece thus:

Whether the fire was deliberately set or caused by human carelessness is irrelevant in the end, because on Wednesday, while the fire was still raging on several fronts, lightning started a fire at Cape Point. The wind switched to a strong south-easter and the fire was only contained because it moved into an area of younger veld [a recent controlled burn]. Now imagine the Peninsula 365 years ago, clothed in 15 year old fynbos without any roads or houses. The same bolt of lightning on 4th March 1650, in the same weather conditions, would have burned the entire Peninsula, all the way to Table Mountain. If ever any more evidence was needed that fire is a natural phenomenon in fynbos, this was it.

The point they both make is that this was always going to happen and it will happen again. And while we can protect ourselves against it to some degree, it’s simply too big a thing to prevent. Thus, the clever money is on building smart (no thatch roof, no wooden fence, no building in the fire breaks etc) rather than assuming that we’re done now and that there won’t be another fire.

Because, some time in the next 10-20 years, there will be.

Some more Friday Ephemera

Posted on

Hey, blog reader. Let’s not beat about the Baardskeerdersbos here (more of that below): you’ve had a good week on here. Well. Prolific, at least. Nine posts on here already and I’m about to add a tenth.
Forget your old adages about Quality over Quantity. You get what you’re given.
And here comes another spoonful right now. Open wide…

Let’s start with Baardskeerdersbos – it’s a tiny village in the Overberg – not too far from the Black Oystercatcher. Crazy name, crazy reason for the name…

The name “Baardskeerdersbos” in Afrikaans or “Baardscheerders Bosch” in the original Dutch literally means “Beard Shaver’s Forest”. The accepted explanation for this name is that a species of solifuge inhabits the area, and that this arachnid is referred to as a “beard shaver” because it cuts hair to use for nest-building.

Cool. What’s a solifuge?

OhmygodIwishIhadn’tlookedthatup.

______________________

We move on, quickly. To Nurofen, who have been accused of misleading consumers in Australia:

The products at the centre of the dispute are Nurofen Back Pain, Nurofen Period Pain, Nurofen Migraine Pain and Nurofen Tension Headache.
The consumer watchdog has alleged that making each product look like it treats a particular type of pain is false or misleading – because the tablets inside are identical.
The drugs, which are sometimes sold for different prices, contain the same active ingredient – ibuprofen lysine 342mg.

Well, just buy the cheapest one then. That was easy.

______________________

Here are some Cybergoths (yes, they are a thing), dancing to the theme music from Thomas the Tank Engine.

Let’s be fair, you can make most anyone look a bit silly by simply changing the soundtrack on a video of them dancing, and the further you go from the original, the sillier it looks. I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the gap between Industrial Aggrotech Power Noise and theme from animated kids’ TV programme about a talking steam train is about as far as you can get, and therefore we may have already reached peak silliness in this particular video format.

______________________

Intelligence news now (or rather lack of intelligence news, lol).

After the State Security Agency joined the long line of spy shops to become a laughing stock, the government is fighting back. On Thursday afternoon, they warned us of an espionage plot hatched by a CIA superspy team comprising Julius Malema, Lindiwe Mazibiuko and Thuli Madonsela.

Seems legit. No, really, it does seem totally legit that our brain-dead State Security Agency thought that this might actually be true.

______________________

This is scary. The Anatomy of a Hack.

In the early morning hours of October 21st, 2014, Partap Davis lost $3,000. He had gone to sleep just after 2AM in his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home after a late night playing World of Tanks. While he slept, an attacker undid every online security protection he set up. By the time he woke up, most of his online life had been compromised: two email accounts, his phone, his Twitter, his two-factor authenticator, and most importantly, his bitcoin wallets.

Basically, it all stemmed from the hacker gaining control over Davis’ email account. The rest was fairly simple. If you take one thing away from this post, it should be those cybergoths dancing to the Thomas the Tank Engine music. However, if you take two things away from it, then the other thing should be to make sure that your email password is as uncrackable as possible.

______________________

This quote (via Sign with a E):

When Bulletproof coffee looks like the answer, the odds are you’re asking the wrong question.

It’s from this article, which isn’t anti-LCHF in the manner of being pro-anything else in particular, but is more about not looking for the one magic diet to make us live forever.

…the truth, as always with diet, is more nuanced. The doctor David Katz, a leading expert on public health who runs the Yale Prevention Research Centre, points out that when it comes to food, there is something worse for us than either sugar or saturated fat: “It is mostly stupidity that is killing us.”

Yes. Sadly, just not quickly enough in some people’s case.

______________________

Finally, a link I tweeted earlier this week – Shawn Benjamin’s photos of the Cape Town fire.

drre

There are obviously a lot of shots around of this weeks events, but I particularly enjoyed this set because of the way that Shawn has captured the human element in so many of his photos. Then, just for balance, there are dramatic fire pictures, smoky ones and a whole heap of helicopters.

What’s not to like? (Apart from the widespread destruction of wildlife and property, obviously.)