Category: learning curve

Science kid

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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.

Cape Town from space

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Astronaut Randy Bresnick shared this image of Cape Town taken from the International Space Station. He says it was this morning, but there was a lot of cloud over Cape Town this morning, so I’m guessing that it was just “a morning”. Still, decent pic:

Click through here for full size.

It’s upside down in conventional cartographical terms, so here’s a quick guide to what you’re looking at:
Robben Island bottom right.
Cape Point top right.
False Bay all across the middle.
Rooi Els and Pringle Bay top left.

You may also be able to pick out Steenbras Dam, just above Gordon’s Bay down in the bottom left corner of False Bay. Hint: Look for the light coloured sand, rather than the blue coloured water. Hmm.

Eclipse

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There was a partial lunar eclipse this evening. Obviously, I took some photos.

I would have taken more photos, but the camera settings had been altered by Mrs 6000 while she was in Russia, and made little or no sense. I think I was lucky to get anything. I’m going to have to try and sort something out before I use the camera again, but a factory reset might just be the easiest route.

Partial lunar eclipses are arguably amongst the least exciting of all astronomical phenomena, but when you consider what they’re up against – stuff like comets and space stations and meteor showers –  they never really stood much of a chance.

Partial Lunar Eclipse’s big brother, Total Lunar Eclipse, has promised to pop in next July.

Schtop! It’sch not ready yet!

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I’m thoroughly wiped out after a really tiring, physically and emotionally draining, and then wonderfully fun, day.

Too much to explain, so please enjoy this ad from several (or more) years ago.

That Dutch guy butting in and helping the film crew do it properly is Ronald Top. I had no idea who Ronald Top is or was, until I recognised him on one of the kids’ series on TV this evening.

You can see another of his Grolsch “Schtop” ads on his website, along with a lot of his other, less important work.

HMDOWDCTHL?

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Because

How Many Days Of Water Does Cape Town Have Left?

was too long for a blog post title. In my humble opinion, anyway.

If you want to know the answer to that question, then you might find a visit to local website howmanydaysofwaterdoescapetownhaveleft.co.za informative.

I went there just that this morning and I saw this:

Really?
Yes, whatever method they’re using, described as:

using our recent consumption as a model for future usage

provides us with the frankly terrifying prospect of October 7th being the day at which Cape Town’s dams hit the apocalyptic 10% mark.

But I think that they’ve got it wrong.

I thought I’d give the rudimentary calculation a go myself.
I went for the mathematically simple:

method.

Long story short, according to the latest city figures, we have 250581 megalitres stored, which is 27.9% of total storage capacity. As has been mentioned ad nauseum, the last 10% of our capacity is “unusable”, so clearly we can only use the first 17.9% bit of that (which is 64.2% of 27.9%).

That’s 160767 megalitres.

And we’re using 642 megalitres a day. So I make that

250 days – April 7th 2018

 

Far more reasonable, and more than a bit of a difference. I even did it in purple for you, and look, it does fit with Clem Sunter’s prediction/calculation.

Look, if you are going to have a website that only has one purpose, at least make it accurate. Does HasZumaQuitYet need checking too (he said, hopefully)?

Not great. Anyway, all in all, it’s still an excellent reminder that one way or another, pretty soon the only thing we’re going to be waist deep in is Shit Creek.

Sans paddle.

 

(I think I can see what they’ve done, by the way: they’ve divided the 250581Ml by 100 instead of 27.9 before multiplying by 17.9. I just don’t know who to tell about it. No contact details on there, see?)