Category: learning curve

Richard Dawkins tweets on thinking logically

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It’s a fairly simple concept, but it’s something a lot of people just don’t seem to understand.
Dawkins sums it up nicely here:

Yes. All of the above.

Pain

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So many plans for blog posts and they’ve all been shelved because I played football today for the first time in 18 months (remember this?). The football was fun, and I think I did ok, considering the length of time it had been since I last played. That’s not what’s stopping me from sitting and blogging. It’s more my body’s reaction to that football which is causing the problem.

Oh my. The pain. Everything hurts. Everything.
I may have over exerted myself “a little”.

The good thing is that it will probably take no more than a week to get over this pain and stiffness. And then I can go and do it all over again. 😀

Don’t Visit Antarctica

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I know, I know. You had other plans for this evening anyway. Me too: I’ve been told that there might be something history related on the History Channel. Granted, this was by the same person who suggested that there would be some music on MTV last week, but it’s got to be worth staying in, just to witness what would be an… er… historic event.

And if you were wondering how you’d even get there in the first place, you should remember that there is a scheduled flight service from Cape Town to Novolazarevskaya Station, so it’s not as hard as you might imagine.
But lousy TV and ease of access to available flights aside, you still shouldn’t go to Antarctica, because tourism is destroying the place. And that’s a bad thing.

Scientists say walking on moss beds will leave footprints that could last for centuries.

Fortunately, this important news is now being shared, thanks to a new commercial from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight:

Not quite sure that green oval at the end works so well, given that it completely misses including the widely-suggested alternative destination, but at least the primary the message is quite clear.

On an altogether more serious, certainly more edgy and somewhat longer note, his hugely interesting piece on the US Wealth Gap is sublime.

Pretty Fly

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This just in from our Agriculture correspondent:
Great news for the Western Cape agricultural sector. We farm sheeps, cows, pigs and the like. We have pretty canola fields. Grain, lots of grain: it makes our beer. We do grapes really, really well.
And now, we’re about to do flies. Common houseflies, black soldier flies and blowflies.
We’re about to have [clarkson] the biggest fly farm – in the world! [/clarkson]

8,500,000,000 of the little buggers.

That’s a lot of flies.

The 8 500 square-metre undercover facility, being built by Gibraltar-based AgriProtein, is due to be completed next year and aims to produce 23.5 metric tonnes of insect-based protein meal and oils and 50 tonnes of fertiliser a day. Fish and chicken farmers have already signed contracts to buy the feed, an alternative to soy and fishmeal, according to Jason Drew, the company’s co-founder.

That 23.5 tonnes of “insect-based protein meal” is a long-winded and fancy way of saying “maggots”. Can you imagine 23.5 tonnes of maggots? Each day? That’s almost 9,000 tonnes of maggots every year. From this one facility alone.
Fear Factor eat your heart out (but not like this).

It might not sound like the nicest thing in the world, because 8.5 billion flies eating rotting food, manure and abattoir waste isn’t the nicest thing in the world UNLESS YOU’RE A FLY AND IF SO, HOW THE HELL ARE YOU READING THIS?, but the science is good, it’s ecologically sound and it makes commercial sense.

My only concern is that the insects will be:

housed in giant cages

Presumably, they’ve considered the size of their livestock and calculated the space between the bars of the cages accordingly, right?

Fly_close

Triple Lightning Strike on Three of Chicago’s Tallest Buildings

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This, via Brian. It’s not the most amazing timelapse I’ve ever seen, but the triple bolt from the blue grey makes it spectacular.

[vimeo clip_id=”99810138″ width=”678″ height=”381″]

On the right, the 442m Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), which was the world’s tallest building from 1974 until 1998. Then in the middle, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, 423m of glass and steel. And then on the left, the John Hancock Center, built in 1969 and the first building in the world outside New York to go above 1,o00ft at 1,127ft (344m) high.

chiclight

For completion, Chicago’s third tallest structure (unstruck here) is the 1973 monolithic monstrosity AON Building, 83 floors, 346m. And for comparison, Cape Town’s tallest building, Portside Tower, is less than a third the height of the Willis Tower, at “just” 142m high.

Video: Craig Shimala